Re: Rational for not making cursor tagged in Containers

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Thu, 19 Apr 2007 16:45:36 -0400, Robert A Duff wrote:

>>> I'm not a big fan of prefix notation, by the way.
>>
>> It is not uncommon that different people have different thinking. For
>> me prefixed notation clearly has advantages. Of course, I like to use
>> them to the fullest :-)
> 
> There is an advantage: If you have type P1.T1, with operation Mumble,
> and P2.T2 extends P1.T1, and X is of type T2, do I say "P1.Mumble(X, ...)",
> or "P2.Mumble(X, ...)"?  It's confusing, because it depends whether Mumble
> is class-wide or dispatching, which is a conceptually minor
> distinction.  And it's not unusual to change from dispatching
> to class-wide.  The notation "X.Mumble(...)" avoids that confusion.

(it replaces one confusion with several others)

> Nonetheless, it just seems weird to me to pretend that Mumble
> is inside X, like a component.  There must be a better way.

The answer could be: fix renaming. The class-wide P1.Mumble should be
automatically renamed to P2.Mumble and the result should not conflict with
the original if the latter is visible. The rule could be that upon
derivation all class-wides were renamed in the current scope.

----------
I think prefix notation is rubbish. There should be an abstract member
interface allowing users creation of whatever "members" they wished. So if
anybody liked prefix notation, he could say: Mumble implements ".Mumble."
Done. Why should the language do this by default?

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de