At 9/5/2000 09:50 AM (Tuesday), Joseph Alba wrote:

>Anyway, the point that we should get from Linus is, INTERFACES are very
>important. If we can agree on a basic (as in base class) interface, then the
>implementations on various platforms can proceed almost independently, and
>these ifdefs could be done away with, compiles will be a lot cleaner.

I agree with what Joseph has said and Linus et al.

We should step back a bit, however, and realize that most of Interbase is
not coded in an OOP language. Therefore, we should first decide if we want
to transform it into an OOP form. Having made that decision the strategy
Joseph outlined easily follows.

Can an OOP version of Interbase be supported adequately on all the
platforms it needs to run on? Is there now enough uniformity in the
semantics of C++ that we can depend on it across all those compilers? Do we
have to end up using Gnu compilers to get uniform implementations? I don't
know the C++ world well but I do know the history of dissimilar
implementations has been a rocky road.