Re: Instantiating private types with discriminants?

[Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

On Fri, 2006-05-12 at 09:37 +0200, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:


> I beg to disagree. Semantic difference you are talking about is not always
> the problem space's one. It is often just a language artefact. In my view,
> exactly the opposite should be done, i.e. removing all traces of "all".
> (:-)) A user-defined pointer (referential) type should (IMO) be considered
> a subtype, that inherits all operations of the target type. If assignment
> gets overridden (to have shallow copy semantics), that does not
> automatically imply anything for other operations.

Will the programmer have a chance to express whether or not
he or she is effectively creating an alias?

Eiffel addresses this in a reversed way, I think. You can write
"expanded" before a class definition, or before the type name
in a feature declaration. So no ".all" either, but at least
a trace of objects versus references.