gl8f@astsun7.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl) (06/01/91)
I would like to implement a set of small and beautiful container classes like SmallTalk. Yes, I know that NIH exists. I only let things derived from class ContainedObject to be within a container class. I don't want all my objects to be a huge tree, just the things that go in containers. Anyway, that's not what I'm asking. When you're searching through a container, you need an equivalence function. If I'm comparing a ContainedInt to a ContainedKitchenSink, I'd like it to always be unequal. If I compare a ContainedInt to a ContainedInt, I'd like a method in ContainedInt to be called. What's the best way to do this? Can I directly get at something that tells me what class an object is, or do I need to kludge it and create a private member that's always at the same offset and test that? I should mention that my only reference is the awful book "An Intro to O-O Programming and C++". I should get a better reference :-/