[3850] in java-interest
method overriding suggestion
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Felix Wu)
Wed Nov 29 21:43:33 1995
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 15:44:47 -0800
From: Felix Wu <wu@cadence.com>
To: java-interest@java.Eng.Sun.COM
Cc: wu@cds769.Cadence.COM
I have a small suggestion with regard to method overriding that is somewhat
related to the recent discussions among David Griswold, Jim Graham, Bill Joy,
and others.
Add a keyword like "overrides" to signify a user's intention of overriding
some method. This should make the code more readable, and the compiler could
issue a warning message if there is no matching method to override (instead
of silently adding it as a new, possibly overloaded, method).
Also, the (explicitly requested) overridding method could have a signature
that's more specific than the overridden one. The compiler could add a little
wrapping code to make its signature the same as the overridden one.
For example, the following overriding 'equals' method
class C extends Object {
overrides boolean equals(C obj) { ... }
}
could be rewritten (implicitly by the compiler) as
[overrides] boolean equals(Object obj)
{
if (obj instanceof C) {
... // the original code
} else {
return super.equals(obj);
}
}
And presumably, all this could be done as compatible extension to the
current Java design.
- Felix Wu
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