Re: Visibility and access to "public" attributes

[doylep@ecf.toronto.edu (Patrick Doyle)]

In article <01bcb787$eeb5a180$7e80400a@gavinspc>,
Gavin Collings <gcollings@sperry-sun.com> wrote:
>
> [Discussion of how Delphi can make functions use the syntax of
>  an assignment statement]
>
>Apart, perhaps, from the overhead of having to declare fRadius separately,
>this method looks certainly more flexible and probably in most interesting
>cases more direct than the Eiffel approach.

  IMO, this is equivalent to being able to do this:

class GOOBER

feature

  volume : INTEGER is do ... end

  volume := (new_value : INTEGER) is do ... end

end

  Now I could write something like this:

my_goober.volume := my_goober.volume + 1

  While apparently an assignment, this would call "volume", add 1 to
the result, and then call "volume :=" passing it the new value as
an argument.

  While this may be nice syntactic sugar, naming a feature "volume :="
seems to have virtually no advantage over "set_volume".  

 -PD
  

-- 
--
Patrick Doyle
doylep@ecf.utoronto.ca