Types, Makers, and Inheritanc

[Tyler Close]

At 05:31 PM 10/20/98 -0700, you wrote:
>On Tue, 20 Oct 1998, Tyler Close wrote:
>> I don't see how it's necessary to have Type objects in order to have an
>> interface to an instance object. In C++, I never had a need or desire for
>> Type objects.
>
>That's because the C++ compiler checks types for you.  In a
>dynamically-typed language like E (or Python, etc.) it's useful
>to be able to check and compare the types of things at runtime.

Well, I have to admit that I haven't done a lot of work in untyped
languages, but I wasn't expecting to change my designs all that much. I
don't see why I should allow my program to loose track of what kind of
objects it's dealing with just because the compiler is no longer doing
static type checking.

Are you really suggesting that you want to do stuff like:

if(x getType isa Foo)
{
	# do a Foo thing
}
else if(x getType isa Bar)
{
	# do a Bar thing
}
else
	...

This seems like crappy design to me.

Tyler