Re: A Law is a Law, Guffaw, Guffaw

[Gregor.pa@Xerox.COM]

    Date: 27 Jun 88 23:57 PDT
    From: Dick Gabriel <RPG@SAIL.Stanford.EDU>

    The point my Debunker team came up with is that the purpose of a law -
    such as the law from Demeter - should be clearly stated. Inlining as a
    means of defeating the law is only interesting because it introduces a way
    to meet the letter of the law without meeting the spirit of it - by
    out-of-lining.  That is, wherever there is a violation of the law, one can
    repair it by introducing local methods. Therefore, I ask: What does the
    law buy you, for stating law only gives no clue about objectives.

I actually asked this question in my first reply to the proposed law.
Based on the fact that I got no real reply, and the other mail I saw, I
concluded that this law was not really applicable to CLOS.  CLOS is a
different language than Smalltalk, and certainly a different language
than C++.

I would still like to see an explanation of exactly what this law is
really trying to provide in terms of helping programmers understand what
their code is doing, or helping compilers or helping whatever.

Since it seems to be difficult to explain the law in netmail, I look
forward to the presentation at OOPSLA.  Until then, I will wait and
wonder.
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