On Fri, 13 Jul 2012 02:49:01 -0400, Jacob Carlborg <d...@me.com> wrote:
On 2012-07-12 22:20, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
Many (most?) classes never care about opHash, opCmp, opEquals and
toString. But Object defines them, incorrectly for most cases.
These apathetic classes would not break at all. And to make the default
be to inherit those methods would promote their usage or reliance on
them.
Not only that, but you are almost *forced* to define them, because you
don't want accidental incorrect usage of them. We have lovely
situations where the only solution is to define a version of the method
that *always throws* in a statically typed language.
It's really a terrible solution (to force the definition of them) which
Andrei quite correctly pointed out only existed because of the lack of
templates back then.
I think this discussion is somewhat academic at this point, as Andrei
seems not too keen on the idea of having dual base classes.
I was trying to suggest something that is mostly backwards compatible.
I understand. I don't think it's worth it. I'd rather opt-in to the old
way than opt-out. People are lazy, they will likely avoid specifying an
alternate base class.
-Steve
