To those of my readers who don't as a matter of course go on and check#

Mon, 10 Mar 2003 18:55:45 +0000

To those of my readers who don't as a matter of course go on and check Shaver's diary and links therefrom

• http://off.net/~shaver/diary/2003/03/#20030309

• http://neon.polkaroo.net/~mhoye/blarg/#objectification

• http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=350D92F5.DB56C233%40netscape.com&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fselm%3D350D92F5.DB56C233%2540netscape.com

• and Lisp, of course, has an agenda here too - http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/Name.html

I might add that pervasive use of getters/setters feels a lot less ugly in a language where the syntax to update an attribute looks just like a method call anyway -

(creditcard-number my-card) => "4123412341234129" ; a slot read
(creditcard-type my-card) => "VISA"               ; a function call
(setf (creditcard-number my-card) "5455555555555555") ; a slot write
(setf (creditcard-type my-card) "mastercard")     ; an error
;;; ... but, oh, look
(creditcard-type my-card) => "Mastercard"         ; it already knew

Actually, I lied. The particular system I took those examples from uses MOPpery to store all its data in a Postgres database anyway, so none of the above is necessarily a straightforward assignment under the covers.

Actually, I lied twice. Those aren't my (or, as far as I know, anybody's) real credit card numbers either. Sorry, folks.