On 2012-08-13 13:28:07 -0700, Jordan Johnson wrote: > I'm curious: what use cases call for the new generics as opposed to > the old class & interface system? I'm trying to get a clearer picture > of the motivation for the new functionality, and the differences > between old-style class-based OO code and this struct-based kind.
This feature isn't intended to replace class-based OO code. Notably, these generics don't have inheritance, overriding, mixins, and other "heavyweight" features that you might use with the class system. Instead, racket/generic is intended to replace the use of struct type properties as a mechanism to add generic behavior to datatypes. Before this library, generic functions like `dict-ref` or `stream-first` relied on ad-hoc protocols where a struct would provide a collection of functions to implement dictionary operations. Now we provide a unified and consistent way to define such generic functions and implement their behavior on specific instances. Cheers, Asumu ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
