Open Multi-Methods article

[Bruce Adams]

On Fri, 04 Jan 2008 12:34:05 -0000, bearophile <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com>  
wrote:

> The "lambda the ultimate" blog often shows interesting articles:
>
> "Open Multi-Methods for C++", by Peter Pirkelbauer, Yuriy Solodkyy, and  
> Bjarne Stroustrup:
> http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2590
> http://www.research.att.com/~bs/multimethods.pdf
>
> They seem fast enough too.
>
> Bye,
> bearophile

Support for multi-dispatch is one thing I'm hoping to see in a future  
iteration of D.
To summarise the paper they propose a syntax for open methods (which are  
free functions)
as opposed to multi-methods using virtual as an argument qualifier.

bool intersect(virtual Shape&, virtual Shape&); // open−method
bool intersect(virtual Rectangle&, virtual Circle&);

This doesn't look a bad solution for either C++ or D2.x/3.x.