On Fri, Feb 07, 2003 at 09:39:14AM -0800, Dan Sugalski wrote: > It's a little more confusing that that. When I said only one foo > method, it was in contrast to attributes, where an attribute of a > particular name may appear in an object multiple times--since > attributes are class-private, each class in an object's inheritance > hierarchy can safely have an attribute named "foo". > > Methods and properties, being global, override each other--a child > class' foo overrides its parent's foo. If the child's foo has > multiple definitions based on signature, or we have foo that crosses > class lines, then the multiple dispatch logic comes online and does > its Weird Magic. > > Rereading that, it still doesn't make much sense, but there you go... :)
Just to confuse things more, there is a question I have reguarding multi-methods and inheritance. Consider class A defines foo() as a multi-method with 3 different signatures If class B then sub-classes A and defines a method foo() does it 1 override all foo() methods in A 2 get added to the foo() methods in the dispatch, so we now have a multi-method with 4 signatures 3 override only the method in A that has the same signature My guess would be (1) and that multi-method distpatch would only happen if B called ->SUPER::foo In which case you could consider that there is only one method named foo(). That method does the dispatch to the others. Now I am probably not making sense :) Graham.
