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Re: [Liberty-eiffel] STRING not conforming to ANY


From: Cyril ADRIAN
Subject: Re: [Liberty-eiffel] STRING not conforming to ANY
Date: Sun, 9 Feb 2014 15:48:59 +0100

Hi Phil,

2014-02-08 23:28 GMT+01:00 Phil Malin <address@hidden>:
I'm in the process of moving off SmartEiffel and over to Liberty and so am converting my personal libraries.  One thing that I've noticed - and which surprised me - is that STRING doesn't seem to conform to ANY.  I'm guessing there have been discussions about this (I tried to do a search on the mailing list but didn't find anything) and was interested in knowing the reasons.  I have no problem refactoring my code but I wondered if this was deliberate or a transitory state of affairs.

This is indeed deliberate. ANY provides common services (through insert), but the SmartEiffel team thought that ANY should not provide polymorphism (and I agree). STRING was one of the last remaining classes of the standard library to still conform to ANY.

Note that there is some thought about implementing conversion, although nothing has been coded yet. It will help alleviate the (ab)use of some patterns—such as the untyped/generic-typed dual classes, which I rely upon quite a lot.

Thanks for your ongoing interest :-)

Cheers,

Cyril ADRIAN
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