Re: [Caml-list] Is a Cow an Animal?

[John Max Skaller <skaller@ozemail.com.au>]

Pixel wrote:

>
>- since class equivalence is based on methods and not on class-name, I have to
>put dummy methods for ensuring the subtyping relation. 
>Is there a nicer/official way?
>
>- I know one can't downcast, but is there no way to have some RTTI? must it be
>done by hand? (adding a C++-typeinfo-like method)
>

You ask in the title "Is a cow an animal?". The answer is no.
Use a variant, give up on classes:

type Animal = Horse of horse | Cow of cow
type horse = Shetland of shetland | Arabian of arabian
...

That is a heterogenous tree structure modelling
the taxonomy. There is no polymorphism here.
There is no subtyping. It is pretty much the exact
opposite: this is unification, the aggregation of
utterly distinct types into a common type.

You can do a bit better sometimes, by recognising
some commonality:

type Animal = {
  animal_common:animal_part;
  animal_variant:animal_split
}

type animal_split = Horse of horse | Cow of cow
...

so that the horse type only contains features unique
to horses. But you should really forget abstraction,
and just build concrete data structures: its really
just a large in memory database, after all:
you really won't gain much hiding the representation here.

>-- 
>John Max Skaller, mailto:skaller@ozemail.com.au
>snail:10/1 Toxteth Rd, Glebe, NSW 2037, Australia.
>voice:61-2-9660-0850
>
>


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