Re: [Caml-list] does class polymorphism need to be so complicated?

[Benjamin Geer <ben@socialtools.net>]

brogoff@speakeasy.net wrote:
> Yes, OCaml doesn't have implicit subtyping. [...]
 > If you want to solve your problem, you'll need to coerce, and you
> can solve it fairly simply by replacing the troublesome line below with one of 
> the following 
> 
> tp#process (et :> fbbq) ;;
 >
 > or
 >
 > let proc o = (new thing_processor)#process (o :> fbbq);;
 > proc et;;

I've thought some more about this idea of wrapper functions, and 
actually, it doesn't seem simple at all.

In an object-oriented program, *all* methods are potentially 
polymorphic; this is what makes object orientation useful.  It means 
that you can always pass, to a method in class C, an instance of a class 
that didn't exist yet when C was written.  A library's author therefore 
doesn't need to anticipate all the classes that will ever use the library.

If you used wrapper functions to do coercions, you would need a wrapper 
function for every method in the program.  This would be extremely 
cumbersome and ugly, and hardly object-oriented.

Doing coercions at the call site is equally cumbersome, and you lose the 
ability to change the method so that it accepts a less derived class.

It seems to me that the idea of interfaces (class types) is quite 
powerful, and would be a good solution, if only the syntax for using 
them in method definitions were not so complicated.

Ben

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