extending methods ?

[Carlo v. Dango]

David Eppstein <eppstein at ics.uci.edu> wrote in
news:eppstein-A4BD3C.10271901102003 at news.service.uci.edu: 

> In article <HyBeb.645796$YN5.495743 at sccrnsc01>,
>  "David C. Fox" <davidcfox at post.harvard.edu> wrote:
> 
>> Perhaps if you tell us more about why you want to do this, we could
>> come up with a better OO solution.
> 
> Actually this seems exactly the sort of thing for which aspect
> oriented programming was developed.

excuse me, but that is utterly and completely rubbish! :-) Specializing 
methods is actually very useful, but I've only seen it in the language 
Beta (well I'm certain it could be achieved in Simula 67 as well). In 
simula classes and methods has been unified into the notion of a 
"pattern". So since you can specialize classes, you now also can 
specialize methods using this pattern construct.

AOP was designed to be able to define CROSS-CUTTING entities crosscutting 
at least 2 inheritance hierachies.

You should all at least try to read up on the Beta language and grasp its 
powerful idea of the pattern construct!

-carlo van dango