Re: "static" declaration

[Lieven Marchand <address@hidden>]

Dan Weinreb <dlw@smartleaf.com> writes:

> When Moon was doing New Flavors, I lobbied him very hard to put in an
> explicit concept of "interface", and he stolidly resisted.  Moon is
> very rarely wrong about anything, but in this case I still think he
> was wrong.  When Java came out, many years later, with a genuine
> "interrace" feature that was pretty much what I'd always wnated, I was
> very impressed.

Did you have a specific idea in mind for this interface concept in New
Flavors? I still don't see what it would buy. In Java, the compiler
will complain if you haven't implemented every method of an interface
you claim to support. This is something CL won't do unless you try to
call that method. This is the same trade off made in other parts of
the language wrt static/dynamic typing. The counterproblem in Java is
that a published interface can't be extended without breaking previous
clients. In Java, it's also impossible to supply default
implementations of methods in an interface, which I find really
clumsy.

-- 
Bored, now.
Lieven Marchand <mal@wyrd.be>