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From: Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: TeX and Pascal [was Re: The joy of FORTRAN]
Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2024 15:57:36 +0100
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On 9/30/24 22:19, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Sep 2024 10:24:30 +0100, Pancho wrote:
> 
>> On 9/30/24 00:15, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>>
>>> C3 linearization
>>
>> Never heard of that before. It sounds far to difficult to understand in
>> practice.
> 
> But it makes the difference between multiple inheritance that
> bewilders and confuses people, and multiple inheritance which makes
> sense. It’s what lets Python have multiple inheritance that makes
> sense.

Single inheritance bewilders and confuses people, that is why we have 
rules for good practice to favour composition over inheritance, to avoid 
obscuring what the code does. The idea being to avoid deep hierarchies.

There is a difference between a consistent implementation of multiple 
inheritance and something that people actually understand when coding, 
or maintaining code.

In essence just because you can do something clever, doesn't mean you 
should.

> 
> Think about why languages like Java and PHP avoided multiple
> inheritance, and substituted those lame “interfaces” instead: it was
> to avoid this bewilderment and confusion that is known to plague C++,
> because the right solution wasn’t known at the time.
> 

I quite like interfaces, polymorphism through interfaces. I was 
generally happier to do a bit of extra code, reimplementing a conflicted 
interface than I would be having to understand a clever linearization 
(total ordering).

However I never developed libraries and so so these concepts may be less 
important for me. There may be pathological cases where it is sensible.


> Once you read the description, you realize it’s the only right way to
> do things, and you wonder why everybody wasn’t already doing it this
> way.
> 
> Here is the paper: “A Monotonic Superclass Linearization for Dylan”
> <http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.19.3910&rep=rep1&type=pdf>

I had a look, it would take me a while to work through the algorithm, 
establish how the ideas sit in the more common language of DAGs and 
graph theory. If there is a significant difference that requires new 
terms such as monotonic.

And, ... that is all hugely easier than considering if this might be a 
good thing to do in code. Above my pay grade.