Go's first commit

Re:Go's first commit by ecnahc515 on Saturday August 27, 2016 @02:39AM (#12371297)

I'd have to guess it would be conflict resolution. Imagine two separately imported packages for which you didn't write that add a method in on a type from a third package you didn't write, all with the same name/method signature. How does the compiler you know which of the implementations to use?

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Re:Go's first commit by junke on Saturday August 27, 2016 @03:01AM (#12371349)

Compiler warning.

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The example, while being possible, looks quite improbable.

If it is only a matters of conflicting names, qualified names should be able to resolve the ambiguity; here I suppose you imagine implementing the same interface for the same type differently in two packages.

That a package implements an interface for the same external method for a third-party type is already dubious. Now, you have two packages like this and you want to import them both. That's quite a corner case.

Practically, the last package that is imported could "win" (so you can decide which you want). The compiler has to register all the possible implementations anyway, so a warning is trivial to emit on redefinitions.

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I'd guess the restriction is to allow compilation of dynamic dispatch on a package basis (think separate compilation) instead of waiting till all possible files have been processed.

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Re:Go's first commit by junke on Saturday August 27, 2016 @05:14AM (#12371660)

I mean dispatch in general, not necessarily dynamic dispatch.

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Re:Go's first commit by dilap on Saturday August 27, 2016 @03:15AM (#12371377)

Yeah, good point. Though it would be handy if you could at least within your own package add methods to types. But then I guess those methods would be uppercase but not exported, which would be weird.

You can certainly imagine schemes like specifying in the import which types to extend, but that seems complex enough that I'm not surprised a language as radically devoted to simplicity as Go left it out.

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