[241] in Coldmud discussion meeting

Connection()

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tue May 17 16:44:13 1994 )

From: Colin McCormack <colinm@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU>
To: coldstuff@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 18 May 1994 06:35:47 +1000 (EST)

In defense of connection(), mooted primitive returning current connection:

To follow the encapsulation argument, wouldn't have to conclude that that
in order to address stdio in C, one should pass in their value, or a reference
to some package containing them not merely where ever they were used, but
whenever one wished to interface with a subsystem that might use them?

This would require each function to know, for the uttermost descendant of
a call tree descending from it, that some function will need stdio.
Does this break information hiding?  How about for virtual functions?

There is a primitive which makes use of connection information,
echo() or somesuch... are you suggesting that this is not needed,
or rather that the appropriate place for accessing current connection
is the server, and only there?

You can stop people writing bad code by making a language that can't 
express `bad constructs', but that does not make people write good code.

Colin.