All -
I'm partly to blame for this thread because I put the idea into
Steve's head that class methods being inheritable may be dogma and not
a useful thing. Mea culpa.
That said, I want to put forward a possible reason why you would
want class methods to be inheritable - to provide pure functions.
If we go back to every function/method/subroutine being behavior,
it's pretty evident that you need some state for that behavior to
operate upon. In a procedural function, the state is provided. In an
object, that state is both provided and inherent in the instance the
method is operating upon. In functional languages, functions maintain
their own state through closures, continuations, and the like.
I might want to provide in a base class a set of useful sorting
routines or other such items. These would be true procedural functions
and there would be a warning thrown if it accessed class state.
Rob
