Terry Reedy wrote: > "Michael Chermside" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > >>Greg Ewing writes: >> >>>"Multiple dispatch" >> >>+1 >> >>How is the noun spelled? "Multiple Dispatch Function"? Too wordy perhaps? >>I >>like it anyhow. > > > -1 > > To me, multiple dispatch mean dispatching on multiple arguments, whereas > the > simple and most common of what we are talking about is, I believe, > sinple arg dispatch to multiple implementations.
Drop the "multiple" part? There's no other function that dispatches. Methods can be thought of as dispatching on their first argument... but even that's a stretch, and you'd only think about it that way coming from a static typed background, and maybe then only if you came to statically typed OO programming after doing non-OO programming for a while. In Python methods are selected based on an object (and that happens on the callers side), and that object is also passed in as the first argument (which happens in the class machinery), and none of that is done by the function/method object itself. So I think calling current method invocation a "dispatch" is not accurate, nor natural. Though calling any current behavior overloading is not accurate or natural either. But I don't know, if we're concerned about how people coming from Java or C++ might misunderstand this... well, I at least am not one of those people ;) Overloaded doesn't bother me, though I still prefer dispatching functions and methods. -- Ian Bicking / [EMAIL PROTECTED] / http://blog.ianbicking.org _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
