Re: Closures versus objects

Pascal Costanza <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.lang.lightweight
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On 21 Feb 2007, at 15:38, Johan wrote:

> James Y Knight wrote:
>> On Feb 20, 2007, at 2:49 AM, Pascal Costanza wrote:
>
>>> The point is that often independent definitions invite what I'll   
>>> call the
>>> "modularity problem" where definitions look ok in isolation but   
>>> surprising
>>> effects happen in combination.  Similar to what
>>>  (+ 1 2 "foo")
>>> might do if we allowed + to be generic."
>
>
>> which, of course, has the exact same behavior as the generic  
>> length  above. That choice of behavior is simply a choice in  
>> specification,  and really has very little to do with whether you  
>> use a generic  function or not.
>
> I think Pascal was aiming more towards the observation that lisp  
> couldn't figure out how to do it well, so didn't do it at all.
>
> I think there may room for an interesting paper comparing the  
> different approaches to problem  solving; is it preferable to have  
> a rapid, but somewhat haphasard solution, or a gem, but much later?

That's the old discussion about whether worse is better or not. See  
http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html


Pascal

-- 
Pascal Costanza, mailto:[email protected], http://p-cos.net
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Programming Technology Lab
Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussel, Belgium
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