Re: Non-philosophical definition of Eiffel?

[Berend de Boer <berend@xsol.com>]

>>>>> "Hyman" == Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> writes:

    Hyman> Berend de Boer wrote:
    >> 1. No one needs to use the facility if you don't want it.

    Hyman> Unfortunately, I believe this facility is heavily
    Hyman> intertwined with generics and container classes in
    Hyman> Eiffel. I think they adopted the notion that if D is a
    Hyman> subclass of B, then container-of-D should be a subclass of
    Hyman> container-of-B.

Yes and no: 

1. The situation only occurs if you have a routine that actually has
   the generic type as argument.

2. There are no "container classes in Eiffel". It's not part of the
   language. There are several popular ones though.

3. And let me tell you that a container-of-D is a subclass of
   container-of-B is very useful in practice. Other languages might
   say they don't this "type-hole", but if you look at the code
   they're riddled with typecasts to workaround it. So essentially,
   it's a nonsen argument if you look at actual code.

I prefer a language that has a known hole above a language where I
must use type casts all over the place, any day every day.

-- 
Regards,

Berend. (-: