Re: Multiple Inheritance in Ada 9X/Pointers?

[mcsun!sun4nl!cwi.nl!guido@uunet.uu.net (Guido van Rossum)]

rosen@cyclope.enst.fr (Jean-Pierre Rosen) writes:
>Of course,Ada lets you easily hide that a structure is implemented by pointers
>into the depth of a package body, provided you distinguish between Abstract
>data types with object semantics and those with value semantics. On the other
>hand, I can't imagine how you could effectively do that in C/C++: the ultimate
>representation "percolates" all the way to the end user. For example: can you
>imagine you can explain someone the behaviour of strings in C/C++ without
>mentionning that a string is nothing but a pointer to character?

True for string meaning "char*", but that's inherently a low-level
concept in C++.  You can easily implement a string class with either
object or value semantics.

--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <guido@cwi.nl>
"All right, it's a fair cop, but society is to blame."