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From: dougw@grebyn.com (Doug Worthington)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.objective-c
Subject: Inheritance question
Message-ID: <25258@grebyn.com>
Date: 4 Feb 91 19:53:38 GMT
Distribution: comp.lang.objective-c
Organization: Grebyn Timesharing
Lines: 26

Currently I am developing on a Next and have the following scenario
and problem.  I have defined a series of objects for use with
databases.  I have an abstract superclass named field that will
manager things similar to all fields like name, width and maybe some
more information.  More specific types of fields are strings, ints
floats etc.  Currently a series of routines allocate the objects based
on the types of database columns requested and returns a charfield,
intfield etc.

        My problem is this.  I want the user to get and set these
fields with the same routine names getValue and setValue without
having to cast the value as an char *, int etc.  When the user
includes the interface files with the program the compiler is confused
with the names complaining that there are more then one get/setValues.
Which there are, one for each type of field with a different
return/parameter type.  This lack of overloading is a bummer.  I
realize I am a bit braindead on this problem but why can't the
compiler do some scoping of the arguements and determine which method
to call.

Thanks

Doug Worthington

dougw@grebyn.com
localhost 12>