On Wednesday, 30 August 2017 at 15:59:32 UTC, Jean-Louis Leroy
wrote:
What happens here is that kick(Animal) is shadowed by
kick(Dog). kick(Animal) is a method but it appears to the user
and the compiler as an ordinary function - which is generally
good. As such it is eligible for UFCS. I would not recommend
this sort of coding, but it's everyone's choice, methods or not.
Likewise, methods can be overloaded (like here
https://github.com/jll63/openmethods.d/blob/1.0.0-rc.1/examples/matrix/source/matrix.d#L12).
A current limitation is that default arguments are not
supported (yet), although I think it's just a matter of putting
the effort in.
UFCS interacts nicely with methods because you can say
a.plus(b) even if 'plus' is an open method.
I had a chance to try out what I had suggested above and it
behaves exactly as I would have expected (i.e. it prints the line
"lassie.kick(): ctbark").
You seemed to emphasize UFCS in your response, but that really
wasn't what I was intending to focus on. I just as easily could
have re-written Dog as below and compiled the program and it
would have printed the same thing. Similarly, any Dog or Pitbull
type that call kick would return "ctbark", just Animals would
return the original results.
class Dog : Animal
{
final string kick()
{
return "ctbark";
}
}
My point is one can easily mix your openmethods's dynamic
dispatch and D's static dispatch. That seems like a great thing
that you could emphasize. Simply stated: if you use openmethods,
you're not forced to only use openmethods. If you know the type
at compile-time, then you can use it. It's only if you want to
dynamically dispatch it that you would need openmethods.
