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Date: Tue, 13 Jun 95 10:03:54 PDT From: bertrand@vienna.eiffel.com (Bertrand Meyer) Subject: A note on one of Steve Tynor's comments To: nice.lib@vienna.eiffel.com Copy to: From: Bertrand Meyer Mailer: BOOM Just a technical point. On 5 June Steve Tynor wrote: > In developing a response, we discovered that the definitions of the > recently added "_REF" classes (REAL_REF, INTEGER_REF, etc.) are not > legal Eiffel. They are effective classes, which have inherited deferred > features (infix "+", infix "<", etc.) without effecting them. In fact the assumption was that the _REF classes do effect the features mentioned by Steve, but do not export them, so the short forms are legal. (Such forms are not meant to be ``legal Eiffel'', just legal short forms.) Although perhaps debatable, this decision makes sense: the _REF classes are there to provide a place in the type system for the basic classes, and to allow expanded-reference transformations, but they are not meant (in my view at least) to be used by themselves. -- BM
