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From: kearns@cs.columbia.edu (Steve Kearns)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Smalltalk-like classes
Message-ID: <1990Sep13.011214.24799@cs.columbia.edu>
Date: 13 Sep 90 01:12:14 GMT
References: <57379@microsoft.UUCP>
Reply-To: kearns@cs.columbia.edu (Steve Kearns)
Followup-To: comp.lang.c++
Organization: Columbia University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 24

One of the biggest pains of smalltalk-like classes is that 
to understand one class may require scanning four or five classes
(the inherited ones).  This is neccessary to find out all the functions
and variables that make up a derived object.

This goes against one of the fundamental principles of object oriented
programming:  a class encapsulates all the functions and data that comprise
an object.  

One solution is to copy the inherited information into the derived
class, prefixing the inherited items with the keyword "inherited".
This is not really a viable solution, however, since an edit of the
super class might require edits in all derived classes.

A better solution seems to be the following: soon we will all be using
nifty class browsers.  I would suggest that these class browsers
automatically copy the inherited items (and their documentation,
please) into the subclass with the inherited keyword, or else in
italics, or prefixed with the superclass name.

The benefit of all this, I repeat, is that one would have to look at
exactly 1 class to understand 1 class.  

-steve