future of Python: Stackless, Standard -> fragmentation ?

Alex Martelli aleaxit at yahoo.com
Sat Oct 7 12:06:19 EDT 2000


"Suchandra Thapa" <ssthapa at harper.uchicago.edu> wrote in message
news:slrn8tt0f4.18d.ssthapa at localhost.localdomain...
> Neil Schemenauer <nas at arctrix.com> wrote:
> >
> >I understand it the .NET VM is more general and powerful then the
> >Java VM.  It was designed as a platform for multiple languages
> >while the Java VM was not.  Also, the .NET VM does not make the
> >security guarantees that the Java VM does.
>
>     But the .NET also has some of the limitations of JVMs.  The biggest
> one is that .NET doesn't have support for multiple inheritance.  I think

That's not really a problem in the 'virtual machine' level (after all,
Intel machinecode has no such support either, yet we compile multiple
inheritance of implementation for it...:-) -- rather, it's at the level of
cross language interoperability conventions.  Your components can
inherit from components written in other languages (and be inherited
by them) only at a single-implementation-inheritance level (no problem
on multiple 'inheritance' of pure interfaces, of course).

> the Eiffel implementation on .NET has to go through some contortions in
> order to get Eiffel's use of MI to work properly.

I don't think there's any issue with inheriting implementation between
Eiffel
classes (or, say, Python classes), but, when multiple languages are in play
at the same time, then, only one cross-language implementation inheritance
(probably even between languages capable of multiple implementation
inheritance, say Python inheriting from Eiffel or vice versa, since there is
no rigidly platform-level-specified way they should implement this, as there
is for all other aspects of language interoperability).


Alex






More information about the Python-list mailing list