From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2010-07-20T13:03:12+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby abstraction

On Sunday, July 18, 2010 02:35:03 am Robert Klemme wrote:
> On 07/18/2010 06:53 AM, David Masover wrote:
> > On Saturday, July 17, 2010 08:21:10 pm James O'Brien wrote:
> >> as a thought-experiment I
> >> propose Java without interfaces would be worse
> > 
> > Probably.
> 
> You could not have Java without interfaces.  You would at least have to
> drop static typing and this would be a major change to the language.  I
> don't think you would still call the result of this operation "Java".

I don't think so. It would be much like Java without Generics -- frustrating 
to work with, but possible. Basically, it kills any sort of polymorphism 
between things which don't share a common ancestor -- so you make more use of 
inheritance in some situations (take Collections, it wouldn't be so bad if we 
had to inherit from AbstractCollection, AbstractList, etc), and aggressively 
abuse modular decomposition (anywhere you have one object that needs to 
pretend to be two types, make two related objects!), and you could make it 
work.

In fact, IIRC, this is how C++ does it -- it's just made much easier due to 
multiple inheritance. I never quite understood why Java allows multiple 
interfaces to be applied to the same object, and even to the same interface, 
but not multiple inheritance.

I'm not suggesting this would be a good idea, mind you -- but then, I'm also 
not entirely sure either Java or C++ is a good idea.