On 24 September 2010 14:22, Bob McConnell <rvm@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > From: David Hutto > >> On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 4:09 AM, Gary <php-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> Daniel Kolbo wrote: >>> >>>> Say you have two classes: human and male. ÂFurther, say male extends >>>> human. ÂLet's say you have a human object. ÂThen later you want to make >>>> that human object a male object. ÂThis seems to be a pretty reasonable >>>> thing to request of our objects. >>> >>> I don't think any human can change gender without major surgery, but I >>> don't know if you just chose your example badly or whether you really >>> think objects should be able to mutate into other types of object >>> without some kind of special treatment. >> >> But it would work in something like makehuman, where you start with a neuter >> form and scale one way or the other for physical features. If I >> remember correctly, >> we're' all xx until you become xy(genetically speaking). > > This is one of the details that really bothers me about OOP. It makes it impossible to implement some very reasonable scenarios. 80% of the time, when a patron is added to a system, we don't know which gender they are. More than 50% of the time, we will never know, since the client doesn't keep track of it. But the rest of them will be assigned sometime after they were added. i.e. the gender assignment comes from a secondary source that is not available at the time the patron is entered. > If you can't handle that, it's not the fault of OOP but your lack of programming skills in OOP I'd say (and I mean no disrespect there, I'm just pretty sure your scenario can be handled very easily in OOP). And no, I have no urge to defend OOP in PHP, I just see this entire thread as a complete non-starter: if the language doesn't let you do something in a particular way, how about you stop, take a breather, then ask if perhaps there's a better way in the language to do what you want done? That would normally be a much more productive and intelligent response than either a) pressing on in the face of failure or b) complaining about your specific needs and how the language fails to meet them. Regards Peter -- <hype> WWW: http://plphp.dk / http://plind.dk LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/plind BeWelcome/Couchsurfing: Fake51 Twitter: http://twitter.com/kafe15 </hype> -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
