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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Multiple Inheritance [was Re: The joy of FORTRAN]
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2024 21:52:34 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On Thu, 3 Oct 2024 08:58:35 +0100, Pancho wrote:

> Deep down, I don't really care about enums. They are nice to have,
> intellisense mainly, but I don't want to spend time thinking about them.

Ah, I wondered. So you depend on your IDE’s autocomplete to do at least 
some of your thinking for you? That might explain your attitude to coding.

Enums have a great many uses. You know about bit masks? I use enums here 
<https://gitlab.com/ldo/inotipy> to give them symbolic names (easier for 
the user to understand) that can be used in a set that encodes to the mask 
(because that’s what the underlying C API expects), and conversely the 
enum provides a classmethod that can decode the low-level mask back to a 
set of symbolic names, for easier display for debugging.

It’s all about using the language tools available to make things easier 
for yourself.

>> “Interfaces” are just “abstract base classes lite”. They are a way to
>> provide a very limited form of multiple inheritance, in the hope that
>> this would somehow avoid the bewilderment that comes from multiple
>> inheritance as done in C++.
>> 
> "Pure virtual classes" rather than abstract.

Only C++ uses the term “virtual” in that sense. Proper OO languages don’t.

> There is a trade off between a software language being simple, and being
> able to neatly solve all problems.

Some languages manage to be simpler, and yet more powerful, than others. 
Compare Python to Java or C++, for example.