All those rules...
I got a chuckle out of this touting of generics support on the CLR - scroll a bit more than halfway down and look at all the rules. Now, contrast that with what it takes to do the same thing in Smalltalk - just implement the darn method in the class you want it in. No fuss, no muss, no nine million rules to follow. I'm sure that the MS team thinks that those rules make things cosmically safer somehow; all they do is add bricks to the mental backload you have to cart around while writing software. Via Julia Lerman.
Comments
If a tree fallls in the forest,....
[Echo in here] December 21, 2004 17:00:36.260
If a tree falls in the forest,... James
CLS != CLR
[Drew Marsh] December 22, 2004 12:12:23.894
I think you're missing something. This is not about generics in the *CLR*. These are guidelines to follow if you want to guarentee that your generic types are accessible across all of the common languages written for the CLR 2.0, but that only support the *CLS*. The *CLS* is the lowest common denomenator. You do not even need to follow these rules if you're coding in a single language that supports all features of generics (e.g. C#) and don't care about people who might be using some language which doesn't have a understanding of generics.
Now, granted it would be great to say "all languages built on CLR 2.0 must support all features of generics!", but... one step at a time. The fact that they even came out with any kind of CLS spec around generics should be considered a win.
Just my two cents, Drew
Don't go introducing facts Drew
[Observer] December 22, 2004 12:23:30.887
Don't go introducing facts on him now Drew and spoil his usual reflex rant-)