[Biococoa-dev] BCPairwiseAlignment

[Charles PARNOT]

At 12:50 PM -0500 3/12/05, Koen van der Drift wrote:
>On Mar 12, 2005, at 12:20 PM, Philipp Seibel wrote:
>
>>
>>But Koen if you have a logical class - subclass structure just tell ....
>>
>
>Uhm, I am not sure if I understand what you mean by that :)
>
>- Koen.


Allow me to jump in the discussion (and hopefully understand the issue).

Subclasses should be used when it makes sense, when the design helps. And not just to separate chunks of code.

Categories are not 'evil'. They are often warned against, but this is mostly when using categories on Apple's classes, because you don't know in which order they are loaded, and you don't know if your category might interfere with someone else's category, and which one will override which in case two methods have the same name.

However, categories used inside your own code can be a nice way to cut your class in smaller chunks, both physically (different files), and logically (I believe the compiler will only recompile the category if only the catgory is modified, which makes for faster builds). For the user of our framework, it is completely transparent, as long as you put all the interfaces in the same header file, so that all the headers can be #import-ed at once.

Does that fit with the ongoing discussion?

charles

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Charles Parnot
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