At 10:02 AM 7/10/00 -0400, Shane Hathaway wrote:
Phillip,
What if the management interface for specialists provided a way to manipulate, or at least view, the table of virtual objects (or, in ZPatterns-speak, DataSkins)? Wouldn't that make ZPatterns more accessible?
Probably. The sticking points are twofold, however. 1) I'm not sure what a default for such an interface would look like, and so am holding off until Ty and I have built a couple of ones for "real life" use. 2) I need a good way to make the methods overrideable without any subclassing (whether in Python or ZClasses), since Specialists "want to be singletons". I have an idea about how to make Specialist and similar ObjectManagers able to permit adding of attributes that they already have, so long as it's a *class* attribute and not a manage_* method, but I haven't had time to implement it yet. If ObjectManagers did this themselves (wink wink, nudge nudge) it would lift a lot of restrictions I'm currently holding to with regard to default interfaces on Specialists, Racks, UserSources, etc., because then users could override them at a whim. I think this may relate to an existing interest of yours regarding specification of interfaces and overriding them in instances; I'd be interested in hearing your comments regardless.