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From: jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony)
Subject: Re: What is wrong with OO ?
In-Reply-To: Ketil Z Malde's message of 12 Feb 1997 09:25:02 +0100
Message-ID: <JSA.97Feb12201057@alexandria>
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References: <5dopri$dei@news4.digex.net> <JSA.97Feb11200125@alexandria>
	<KETIL-ytq20ammnxd.fsf@imr.no>
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1997 01:10:57 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.c++:247572 comp.lang.smalltalk:51517 comp.lang.eiffel:18405 comp.lang.ada:57519 comp.object:61084 comp.software-eng:53726

In article <KETIL-ytq20ammnxd.fsf@imr.no> Ketil Z Malde <ketil@imr.no> writes:

> jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony) writes:
> 
> > Nick is correct here.  This is a problem in C++ (along with
> > friendship) as it requires prescience on the part of the developer
> > and/or various maintenance problems: if you later decide it should be
> > virtual, you have to go back and _change_ the source of the parent
> > thereby changing the semantics in various other places.  If you decide
> > you need a new "friend" you have to go back and _change_ the source
> > (which you may not even have accesss to!)
> 
> Yes, I agree, the developer of a class needs to think about how the
> class is going to be used in the future.  Usually, I don't think this is
> a great problem.

Fair enough.  How bad this is is going to be relative to a lot of
other things (is it a library class?, does it define a well known and
understood thing which is not likely to change, ...)

/Jon
-- 
Jon Anthony
Organon Motives, Inc.
Belmont, MA 02178
617.484.3383
jsa@organon.com

