[Python-3000] Special methods and interface-based type system

[Greg Ewing]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> I fear I will miss the class as a convenient focus for
> related functionality.

I have the same feeling. I get the impression that
generic functions work okay in a language designed
around them from the beginning. But adding them
belatedly to a language built around classes and
methods would give Too Many Ways To Do It.

Another thing I don't like about generic functions
is their comefromish nature. You know that an
implementation of a method for some given type
is going to be defined in one of a few easily-found
places, but an implementation of a generic function
for that type could be anywhere in the program.

Or maybe that's just another way of stating your
"classes as a focus of functionality" argument. In
any case, from a software engineering viewpoint it
seems bad, for the same reasons that monkeypatching
is generally considered undesirable.

--
Greg