Higher Logics

I posted awhile ago about a pattern for ad-hoc extensions in .NET using generics. Unfortunately, like every "design pattern", you had to manually ensure that your abstraction properly implements the pattern. There was no way to have the compiler enforce it, like conforming to an interface. It's common wisdom that "design patterns" are simply a crutch for languages with insufficient abstractive power. Fortunately, .NET's multicast delegates provides the abstractive power we need to eliminate the design pattern for ad-hoc extensions: /// <summary> /// Dispatch cases to handlers. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="T">The type of the handler.</typeparam> public static class Pattern<T> { static Dispatcher<T> dispatch; static Action<T, object> any; delegate void Dispatcher<T>(T func, object value, Type type, ref bool found); /// <summary> //...

One of my older posts on Stackoverflow listed some of what I consider to be flaws of C# and/or the .NET runtime. A recent reply to my post posed a good question about one of those flaws, which was that sealed classes should be allowed as type constraints. That seems like a sensible restriction for C# at first, but there are legitimate programs that it disallows. I figured others would have run into this problem at some point, but a quick Google search didn't turn up much, so I will document the actual problem with this rule. Consider the following interface: interface IFoo<T> { void Bar<U>(U bar) where U : T; } The important part to notice here is the type constraint on the method, U : T. This means whatever T we specify for IFoo<T>, we should be able to list as a type constraint on the method Bar. Of course, if T is a sealed class, we cannot do this: class Foo : IFoo<string> { public void Bar<U>(U bar) where U : string //ERROR: stri...

I've just added a simple diff algorithm under Sasa.Linq. The signature is as follows: /// <summary> /// Compute the set of differences between two sequences. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="T">The type of sequence items.</typeparam> /// <param name="original">The original sequence.</param> /// <param name="updated">The updated sequence to compare to.</param> /// <returns> /// The smallest sequence of changes to transform /// <paramref name="original"/> into <paramref name="updated"/>. /// </returns> public static IEnumerable<Change<T>> Difference<T>( this IEnumerable<T> original, IEnumerable<T> updated); /// <summary> /// Compute the set of differences between two sequences. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="T">The type of sequence items.</typeparam> /// <param name="origina...