"Peter Dimov" <pdimov@mmltd.net> wrote in message news:099701c54ab2$8f8fb080$6401a8c0@pdimov2... | Thorsten Ottosen wrote: | > I think you have to explain why they are not different then. | | The burden of proof lies usually with the person making the statement. ;-) no, the burden of proof lies on the person making the controversial statement; in this case you. stuff like "value-based programming is not different from OO-programming" just seems weird to me; we probably won't get anywhere before we can agree on how to define these two terms. | The reference semantics vs value semantics axis is orthogonal to OO, in my | opinion. | The fact that in C++ you can't (efficiently) have polymorphism with | value semantics doesn't mean that copying a value and copying a polymorphic | object are conceptually or fundamentally different. | A cloning pointer is a very good approximation of a polymorphic value. I | don't see why you consider it conceptually different from a value. because you had to put "polymorphic" in front of "value" to describe what it means; polymorphic objects don't have value-based copy-semantics; you can't provide meaningful copy-constructor and copy-assignment operators. A "value object" implies something that behaves as an int; a "polymophic object" implies something that needs to allocated dynamically and which has virtual functions. trying to make a polymorphic object behave like a value object is confusing a best. -Thorsten