On Thursday, 3 April 2014 at 22:58:24 UTC, w0rp wrote:
I notice that he mentioned the objection to defining equality
and so on for the root object. I have heard this before from
Philip Wadler, and the more I think about it, the more it makes
sense. This is essentially the idea of removing every method
from Object, which we have dicussed before.
I used to discuss against it, but came to realize it does
actually make sense.
Java came up with it most likely as it was the way in Smalltalk.
But nowadays we know better, those concepts are better expressed
via interfaces/traits/protocols, or whatever they are called in
every language.
In languages with generics support and some form of interface
definitions, there is no need for root objects.
--
Paulo
