🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <27CD159D.6581@tct.uucp>, chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
|> I had not envisioned a virtual function to return type information,
|> but rather a virtual function to actually _do_the_work_, so no one
|> outside of that function need know the actual type of the object
|> stored.

You're still missing the point, Chip.  I'm generally against functions
to return type information, but there are places where you need to do
something of this type.  Sure, you can have a virtual function to
store an object on disk.  But how are you going to read it back?  There
is nothing on the disk but data.  A similar problem occurs when inter
process communication is required.  The system designer must provide
some scheme to allow the type to be determined.

The interesting thing, though, is that the solution many propose to
the problem of determining the type doesn't address this situation at
all!  If, say, I provide an automatically generated virtual function to
return the type somehow, that function won't tell me what's on the disk
either.

--
Joe Buck
jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu	 {uunet,ucbvax}!galileo.berkeley.edu!jbuck