Re: [Libxmlplusplus-general] coding style issues

[Stefan Seefeld <seefeld sympatico ca>]

Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-01-31 at 17:13, Stefan Seefeld wrote:
>
> > 2) 'using foomethod;' in derived class declaration:
> >    Murray suggests people may not be familiar with that concept.
> >    The goal of this shortcut is to drag base class methods into the
> >    derived class. A more lengthy way would be to write
> >    'foomethod() { BaseClass::foomethod();}
>
>
> I don't see the point of this if the base class's implementation isn't
> even used by the base class. I would just put the implementation in the
> derived class where it's public. The public API would not be any
> different and the implementation would be simpler.

Again, it's a matter of encapsulation. It's the base class that knows
how to implement 'foomethod'. You don't define methods in class A
because class A itself uses them, but because someone else may want to
call 'foomethod' *on* an object of type 'A'. (in our case that 'user' is
the derived class.

Besides, as I noted in the patch manager thread, I can see a future 
change in libxml++ where we only have a single 'Node' base class 
providing complete access to the full libxml2 node API, but in terms of
'xmlChar *', not 'std::string', and then make the concrete node types
templates. Thus it's really a matter to keep the code simple to 
concentrate it in xmlpp::Node...

Regards,
		Stefan