on Sun Jun 24 2012, Pyry Jahkola <pyry.jahkola-AT-iki.fi> wrote:
https://github.com/pyrtsa/poly
Comments are welcome!
After a quick skim: Very cool! Reminds me a bit of something I did, entirely in the static polymorphism space: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/120408... But I guess your work is fundamentally different from what I was doing. One thing I didn't see you mention there is that since your generic functions are first-class objects, they can be passed and returned, thereby supporting higher-order functional programming.
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I am aware that Steven Watanabe has put some astonishing work on his proposed Boost.TypeErasure. I'm open for discussion whether and how his or mine is a better approach, or if we could combine these into an eventual Boost.Interface library or such!
Very interesting. Does either approach support operator overloading?
PS. Like I mention in my GitHub page, this kind of type erasure is common in functional languages like Haskell or Clojure. The problem they are solving there is known as the Expression Problem.
Is that different in essence from the Binary Method Problem?
IMO it makes very much sense to have the corresponding construct in C++ too, as we're moving towards a more and more functional style with parallelism and such.
Well, it's not as though we can't already do functional programming in C++... I think you might be conflating issues here. Isn't this really about a way to do runtime polymorphism with value semantics? -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com