Re: Reference classquery

Philippe Ribet:

> Paolo Redaelli wrote:
>
>>I would rename the class. Perhaps REFERENCED[INTEGER] could be clearer
>>to understand and nearer to its semantic.
>>
> I'm not sure it's clearer. The integer you set is not referenced:
> a: INTEGER
> ra: REFERENCED[INTEGER]
> ra.set_item(a)
> a is not referenced by ra.

My two cents:

-Class names are generally nouns, so "REFERENCED" would be unorthodox. Of
course, we could jump on the DSL bandwagon to make "REFERENCED" trendy.

-In my opininion, for an expanded classes A, REFERENCE[A] really is a box
(I believe the term "boxed integer" is reasonably standard).

-Note that REFERENCE[A] is also useful if A is a reference classe (if you
want to share a mutable reference between several objects). In this case,
REFERENCE really is a reference.

-There's also WEAK_REFERENCE[A], which is only useful if A is a reference
class.

I'm not sure I'd bother renaming the class.
-- 
Frederic Merizen