Path: utzoo!yunexus!ists!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!shadooby!samsung!aplcen!haven!uvaarpa!mcnc!thorin!zeta!tuck From: tuck@zeta.cs.unc.edu (Russ Tuck) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++ Subject: Re: Shippable C++ Objects (RFC) Message-ID: <10601@thorin.cs.unc.edu> Date: 18 Nov 89 16:14:01 GMT Article-I.D.: thorin.10601 References: <31.UUL1.3#5109@pantor.UUCP> <4042@cadillac.CAD.MCC.COM> Sender: news@thorin.cs.unc.edu Reply-To: tuck@zeta.cs.unc.edu (Russ Tuck) Organization: University Of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Lines: 25 > (Original heading and author lost. Sorry.) > "The object can reconstruct itself from the byte stream" requires > that the object already exist. It still seems to me that you *have* > to have a case statement somewhere which knows about all (interesting) > object classes. As I understand it (and I'm sure someone will point it out if I'm wrong), the receiving program only needs to know about the *top-level* classes it receives. Those top-level classes will take care of the other classes they may contain (ie, as member data), automatically and transparently to the receiving program. So there's a case statement or call table containing the a few classes the receiving program must know about, but there's no need for the receiving program to know about the lower-level classes used by the implementation of those top-level classes. This is just like a called subroutine must know about the classes named in its argument list. Russ Tuck tuck@cs.unc.edu UNC Dept. of Computer Science ...!mcnc!unc!tuck CB# 3175 Sitterson Hall Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3175, USA (919) 962-1755 or 962-1932