Fully dynamic d by opDotExp overloading

[Christopher Wright]

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "bearophile" <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote in message 
> news:gsai34$1p9k$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> Nick Sabalausky:
>>>> There are people who swear by the ability of adding methods at runtime 
>>>> and
>>>> changing the inheritance hierarchy dynamically. It makes for a very 
>>>> fluid
>>>> environment.
>>> Personally, I've always seen that as extremely sloppy and haphazard.
>> Adding methods at runtime is named "monkey patching", and it is considered 
>> a bad practice even in Python.
> 
> Interesting, I didn't know that.
> 
>> Usually in such languages such things are less dangerous because the code 
>> contains lot of tests anyway.
> 
> See, that just sounds to me like the dynamic-ness is just creating extra 
> work for less payoff. I'd rather have my compiler automatically guarantee 
> correctness (when possible) than have to manually create even more tests 
> than I'm already creating and *hope* that they catch all the problems.

Assuming that you are testing the logic of your application, you will 
trivially check things like accessing "legnth" rather than "length" -- 
under the assumption that these two methods would do different things. 
You would spend approximately no additional testing effort on opDotExp.

This doesn't hold if you are not writing tests.