[Biococoa-dev] (no subject)

[Charles Parnot]

On Jul 4, 2005, at 1:01 AM, Philipp Seibel wrote:

>
> Am 04.07.2005 um 07:48 schrieb Charles Parnot:
>
>>> There is a structural failure in our implementation, the user  
>>> thinks he will get a BCSequence object, when he calls a init or  
>>> convenient method of BCSequence, but he gets a  
>>> BCAbstractSequence. So we have to fix the inheritance model.
>>
>> Hi Phil,
>> Can you clarify this? I don't understand what you mean :-)
>>
>
> Hey Charles,
>
> Sure. We have to make one class out of BCSequence and  
> BCAbstractSequence, i would suggest to name it BCSequence.
> And now to the big "WHY??":
>
> The problem is, that a user writes in his code:
>
> BCSequence *seq = [[BCSequence alloc] initWithString:anySeqString];
>
> seq will be for example of type BCSequenceRNA, but BCSequenceRNA  
> doesn't inherit from BCSequence.
> Objective-C allows our current implementation, but it is a  
> structural failure. We need to subclass the BCSequenceNucleotide  
> etc. from BCSequence and put the code of BCAbstractSequence in  
> BCSequence.

I don't see why BCSequenceRNA *has* to inherit from BCSequence. Like  
you say, the implementation works fine and is transparent to the  
user. You choose to use a BCSequence object that can respond to all  
messages and be any type of sequence. Or you choose to work with a  
typed class, e.g. BCSequenceRNA, that only responds to nucleotide- 
specific messages (at least from the comppiler point of view).


> It's hard to explain, the easiest thing is to look at the NSValue &  
> NSNumber implementation of GNUStep.
> If you looked at the implementation and then read my message  
> again ;-) you will hopefully understand.

I think there is a misunderstanding, then! The BCSequence is *not* a  
class cluster. NSValue and NSNumber are class clusters.

I believe you will have more questions following that, but I will  
just wait for them instead of trying to address everything now ;-)

charles

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Charles Parnot
charles.parnot at gmail.com