OON: "Subclassing" algorithms

From: Konrad Hinsen (hinsen@ibs.ibs.fr)
Date: Thu Apr 24 1997 - 10:59:51 EST


Since it has become rather quite here, let me throw in a new topic.
It's about a problem that, to the best of my knowledge, is not covered
by existing OO methods, but falls in the class of problems that OO was
designed to solve.

Suppose I have an algorithm for a specific problem, and an
implementation that works. Now I want to tackle a similar problem that
can be solved by a similar algorithm. All it takes is perhaps the
modification of one step, or the addition of one. I would like to be
able to "inherit" the working implementation while just replacing or
adding small parts of it. And of course I do not want to modify the
existing (supposedly well tested) code.

One possibility would be to write each step as a function and call
these function via pointers that can be substituted. But that would be
a very inefficient solution; what I want is fully optimized code for
all versions of the algorithm. So I would certainly need the source
code of everything.

Has any work been done on this kind of problem? Or is it a stupid
idea due to some limitations I have overlooked?

-- 
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Konrad Hinsen                          | E-Mail: hinsen@ibs.ibs.fr
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