[Python-3000] pep 3124 plans (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Sun Jul 22 03:28:27 CEST 2007

Phillip J. Eby wrote:

Well, I've worked with people who dislike OO for exactly the same reason, since they feel they can never know whether a method might have been overridden in a subclass.

I think there's a considerable difference in degree here, though. When you call a method, you know you're delegating responsibility to the object for carrying out that operation. And you know you're delegating it to that object and no other, so given the run-time type you can find the code that gets called fairly easily.

With GFs that require overloadable functions to be declared as such, you know when you call one that you're delegating to something. But it's a lot less clear what you're delegating to or where. Any or all of the arguments could be determining which piece of code gets called, and the code could be in a much wider variety of places, not necessarily even near any of the classes involved.

If any function can be overloaded, then any call could potentially be delegating somewhere, increasing the range of possible behaviours even more.

-- Greg

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