Alloy Workshop There are still two slots available for the alloy workshop! I've been hard at work adding a bunch of teaching innovations to the class, which...

This essay says that inheritance is harmful and if possible you should “ban inheritance completely”. You see these arguments a lot, as well as things like “prefer composition to inheritance”. A lot of these arguments argue that in practice inheritance has problems. But they don’t preclude inheritance working in another context, maybe with a better language syntax. And it doesn’t explain why inheritance became so popular in the first place. I want to explore what’s fundamentally challenging about inheritance and why we all use it anyway.

  • onlinepersonaEnglish
    4·
    8 months ago

    OK, I think I’m getting it.

    A product is a set that this is the result of an ordered cartesian products.

    struct Car {
  make: String,
  model: String,
  seats: u8,
}

    Car = String X String x u8.

    An enum is a series of "or"s.

    enum Animal {
  Dog,
  Cat,
  Giraffe,
  Chimpanzee,
}

    can also be thought of as Animal = Dog | Cat | Giraffe | Chimpanzee. Where Dog is a type that only has single value in its set aka Animal = {1} | {2} | {3} | {4}, but it could also be strings, or other objects. Rust however allows more complex objects:

    enum ComplexEnum {
    Nothing,
    Something(u32),
    LotsOfThings {
        usual_struct_stuff: bool,
        blah: String,
    }
}

    In this case is Something(u32) the equivalent of any “tagged” u32, meaning in memory it’s something like a Tag + 32 bits where Tag is a constant string of bits, maybe itself a u32? Wouldn’t that make it a product type?
    But then LotsOfThings is itself a product type LotsOfThings = bool x String.

    So to put it all together ComplexEnum = Nothing | TaggedU32 | (bool x String)? Is that correct?

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    • arendjr
      3·
      8 months ago

      So to put it all together ComplexEnum = Nothing | TaggedU32 | (bool x String)? Is that correct?

      Pretty much, yeah. But just be aware the tags are effectively unique constants, so each has only one value. For consistency I would write it as:

      ComplexEnum = Nothing | Something(u32) | LotsOfThings(bool x String)

      In this notation,Something(u32) could also be written as 1 x u32 because tags are constants.

      • onlinepersonaEnglish
        3·
        8 months ago

        OK, so finally I get it. It’s pity none of the blogs I’ve read or wikipedia articles in existence spell it out this way. Instead it’s a bunch of math mumbo jumbo.

        Thanks for helping me reach understanding 🙏 And thanks to @[email protected] too.

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