Michael S (already5chosen@yahoo.com) on 3/10/08 wrote:
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>Violently disagreed. Static polymorphisms is evil. More here: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.std.c++/browse_frm/thread/52128201a14517df/7eca715a6200b04d#7eca715a6200b04d
>I was handed a good beating :(

I think you deserved it. :-)

1. I hate encoding type information in names. I never call you "Person Michael", I don't want to have to do the same thing for my functions, either. If I want to give OpenGL a vertex, then I should only have to declare the type I want to use for my vertices once, not every single time I submit one.

2. I see operator overloading as critical. Without it, user-defined classes are second-class citizens of the language and can never be substituted for/added to the built-in types as if they were one. The only way to get a type you want to be a first-class citizen is to plead with the language maintainers, and they have to satisfy multiple, conflicting desires.

3. References are good. I always use them for parameters unless it is allowed to be NULL, and I normally use them for variables unless the variable is allowed to point to different objects at different times. It makes the code self-documenting. (It isn't really any shorter to type, because VisualAssist automatically converts a '.' to a '->' if it is appropriate, so you I just type '.' all the time anyway.)

>>None of that requires the use of OO to be of benefit, and most of it doesn't create unexpected code.
>
>Wishful thinking.

Most of it doesn't. (Well, none of it does if you know the language well enough because you know what to expect, but even for a C programmer who expects it to behave like C, most of it is pretty safe. Even stuff like templates won't contain any more code than is necessary to implement to type-specific stuff on a good compiler (i.e. small stuff will be inlined depending on optimisation settings, larger stuff will be out-of-line and all but one copy eliminated by the linker). Even iostreams is pretty good these days, although in the case of iostreams, it's relative.)