Re: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

[Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@d2-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote:
: He's listed as a "member of the expert group". The Java generics
: are particularly bad. While that presentation likes to make the
: usual lies about C++ templates, what they don't tell you is that
: in the Java generics the type parameters can't be fundamental
: types, only Object-derived ones (look at all their examples), and
: that you can't overload on generics:
:     class Joe {
:         void f(List<Integer> l) { }
:         void f(List<Byte> l)    { }
:     }

Yes and no. Perhaps it's the bad habit of many a C++
program to not give names to types, that is use abstraction,
and instead use "in place generics", that leads to this
expectation?
     class LI extends LinkedList<Integer> {}
     class LB extends LinkedList<Byte> {}
     class Joe {
         void f(LI l) { }
         void f(LB l) { }
     }
(Not that easy exposing just the List interface, which I've just learned
is easily accomplished in Eiffel, using a "join feature".)
I'd guess that Betrand Meyer will tell you that OO is in many cases
about *avoiding* overloading.
     class Joe ... {
         void f(List<Integer> l) {}
     }
     class Jane ... {
         void f(List<Byte> l) {}
     }
As for fundamental types, in a true OO language there shouldn't be
non-OO types in the first place, so some true OO-languages
don't have them :-)
I'm not saying that any language should be a true OO-language and
nothing more.