On 11 Oct 2001 13:39:33 GMT, Christopher Blizzard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>I think that it's wrong to say that bit fields are infinitely >extensible, just because they happen to be bit fields and you can pass >in whatever you want. The contract that we're talking about here isn't >just a binary one as you elude to, it also defines what you can pass in >and what the expected behaviour should be as a result of that call. I >mean, why don't we just start using varargs for everything? > I think that a generic "all flags are extendable" rule is wrong. However, not in all cases. The nsIProgrammingLanguage example given is one example. Another one is my changes to bug 89500, which made the "does this protocol support proxying" a flag variable. For various reasons (like the fact that irc/mailnews don't really use that interface to create channels), an nsIProxyableProtocolHandler wasn't a solution. If you ignore the fact that I changed the name of the flags variable, then adding two extra bits was not an issue. Existing protocols didn't have to be changed, Those that wanted to support proxying did have to change to get the new functionality. That still keeps the contract to existing classes. Bradley
