vdaele@cstw35.prl.philips.nl (Marc van Daele) (02/07/90)
I wonder why the explicit 'repeat parent' construction in the export list is necessary. Suppose a class A, and a class B inheriting from A. Class A exports a feature called featureOfA. Class B has no 'repeat A' instruction nor exports featureOfA explicitly. Now, create a:A, and b:B in an arbitray class C. b.featureOfA is invalid. a:=b; a.featureOfA IS valid. So even if B does not export the features of A, they still can be applied. Why was it chosen to mention explicit this exporting of features, while an implicit (if B inherits from A, B automatically exports all the features that A exports) method would work as well. In that case the difference between the above mentioned constructions would disappear and both would be valid. I think an implicit export of inherited features, would make the language more straightforward. IF this is a stupid question THEN I'm a novice eiffel user -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Marc Van Daele vdaele@cst.prl.philips.nl There are 14 million Dutch people. What a pity there are so many zeros in it.