Re: Generics vs. Message passing: object namespaces

On 2/22/07, Tom Locke <[email protected]> wrote:
> I may well have missed it, but in all this talk of generic-function
> based OO vs. message-passing OO, what about the issue of namespaces
> scoped to objects.
>
> e.g.
>
>     buffer.append(x) vs. append_to_buffer(buffer, x)
>
> I believe I am correct in stating that the generic function style
> requires the latter? Sharing a single generic function "append" among
> the very wide range of objects that might provide a definition isn't
> workable.

Why not?

The usual implementation of this sort of thing is a table of methods.  Along one
dimension we select by the type of the object and along the other we select by
the method name.  In a Simula-style implementation, the table is
usually sliced up
according to type, but in a CLOS-style implementation it is sliced up
by message.

-- 
~jrm