eiffelroom - A plea for nested classes (sarcastic) - Comments

Made my day

aleitner — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 02:25:14 -0700

Martin,

your just made my day (; Very nice quote!

Andreas

sarcastic post, informative reply

ericb — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 11:57:05 -0700

Knowing that you don't like inline agents, I indeed understood that this post was sarcastic. But being sarcatic should not prevent from getting some informative replies. There is always something to learn, even from a thread that started by sarcastic post.

nested classes

mtn — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 11:26:29 -0700

I think tuples are in many ways to classes what inline agents are to features. Although the latter is more powerful.

-- mTn-_-|

I didn't get the sarcasm.

bayt — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 10:53:00 -0700

I didn't get the sarcasm. The title is misleading and might confuse others as it did confuse me.

Explanation

colin-adams — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 09:28:00 -0700

I had hoped that my postscript was sufficient to indicate that this post was sarcastic.

There is no need for nested classes, any more than there is a need for nested function (inline agents).

Put all classes in one file

ericb — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 09:08:55 -0700

There is no need for nested classes in order to avoid having to write multiple files: just put all classes in the same file. I don't remember whether this is allowed or not in ECMA/ISO Eiffel, but it was in ETL2 and it is implemented in Visual Eiffel. The Gobo Eiffel Tools library has an option to parse several classes in the same file as well. Allowing having several classes in the same file makes the compiler slower (in the same way it is slower when allowing to put classes in files whose name is different from 'classname.e'). But it will be very convenient if one day we have an EiffelScript language.

A plea for nested classes (sarcastic)

colin-adams — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 07:37:56 -0700

I was pleased to see that EiffelStudio 6.0 now eliminates the need for an ECF file - all you need to do is supply the name of a root class, and it will compile your program for you.

This opens up some fascinating possibilities.

Thanks to the ECMA committee, we already have nested functions:

class TEST

create

    make

feature

    make is

            -- Execute test.

        do

            print ((agent (a, b, c, x: REAL_64): REAL_64

                -- Agent to evaluate ax^2 + bx +c

            do

                Result := a * ((agent (y: REAL_64): REAL_64

                                    -- Agent to evaluate y^2

                                do

                                    Result := y * y

                                end

                ).item ([x])) + b * x + c

            end

            ).item ([3.0, -2.5, 7.09, 5.6]))

        end

end

Now, if we could only have nested classes too, we wouldn't need to write multiple files, one for each class, we could just write the entire program in one class.

So come on ECMA - please give us nested classes too.

P.S. While you are at it, how about self-modifying agents? I miss the days of my assembler-coding youth.