Overloading/Inheritance issue

[Bruno Medeiros]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>>
>>> 4) Having overloads spread across the inheritance hierarchy makes the 
>>> source code resistant to visual audits. For any method call, you'll 
>>> have to look at EVERY base class to see if it has an overload that is 
>>> a better match.
>>>
>>
>> I'm not sure if you've seen my other reply to this argument, but let 
>> be more explicit, with pictures. Let's say you have such a big 
>> inheritance hierarchy, with overloads spread across it.
> 
> I appreciate that you can write tools to analyze it. I think they help a 
> lot in writing the code, but I don't think they are as helpful for 
> auditing (code review).
> 

Auditing, as in someone review someone else's code? Well, yes, in that 
case that tool functionality wouldn't be that useful (although other 
functionalities might be), however, auditing is a very specific 
situation, as well has it has lots of other difficulties which aren't 
easy to handle.

> Another problem with them is they are not part of the D compiler itself, 
> and in my experience add on tools rarely get used, no matter how useful 
> they are.

"rarely used"?? Wait, what do you mean "add-on tools"? That 
functionality is part of JDT (the best (non-commercial) and most popular 
Java IDE), and similar functionality exists in other IDEs for other 
languages, so it's quite the opposite of rarely used.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - MSc in CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D