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You could argue that the former is true. The latter is not. That's actually expected behavior. Try it yourself. Create a class A and a class B (I used both virtual, but you don't have to). Make a class C that inherits from both. Typecast a C-pointer to an A-pointer and a B-pointer. Print out the numerical values of all pointers concerned. One, but not both, of the A-pointer and the B-pointer will be the same as the C-pointer. The other will not. There's no decent way around this. If you typecast to a void pointer in between, there's no way for the language to know what the fudged fixup modifier is, so it just leaves the pointer numerically the same, which breaks either the A-pointer or the B-pointer. Usually the first parent class is fine and all later parent classes break -- that's how VC++ does it, and I think GCC as well.
Whose responsibility is that, if not the language designers? The compiler writers, I guess. I'm not sure. Who are you blaming here, besides me? The language doesn't specify the bitwise layout that causes this problem, it just specifies a situation where you pretty much have to do it this way, so everyone does.
Actually, I was well aware that you can use exceptions. I've just used compilers that support them poorly, so I don't use them. I've also worked with programmers that understood them poorly so (thank God) we didn't use them. And I'm aware that you can debug an operator like any other function, and that debuggers tend to support it poorly, and you can't return an error code, and using it in questionably-matched problem domains is (still) a bad idea.
And yet they do so much to enable it in C++, and so little in a number of other languages.
Well, if not then having a "strong type system" deserves to be in quotes, as I continue to express it.
You're assuming that anything that isn't directly ruled out isn't affected. You're also assuming that anything optional will have no bad effects on behavior. You know how silly that sounds, right?
"We made sure that murder was optional, so we figure it won't cause any problems. Our laws aren't responsible for your neighbor's maliciousness. Move to a better neighborhood."
Even in Switzerland (and similar places) where they have more than one official language and more than one language commonly spoken, they tend to speak only one. If adding features is always good, why don't the Swiss constantly speak a French/German/English pidgin to everyone they meet? They know all the component parts, and so does almost everybody they speak to. Is it just angelbob-style contrariness on their part?
And yet if they were writing for a mass audience, or even more than one person, they'd still be better off choosing one or the other and sticking to it. And the fact that the two languages are independently defined (are the subsets of C++? Where?) means that they can easily and quickly determine what subset to use, and they don't have to remember individually whether, for instance, Swahili animal names are being used with English grammars in this specific setting.
Shall I throw your comment about a class in logic back at you now, or wait until later?
To make this explicit: you've taken my position, extended it to its most ridiculous extreme, and thrown it back at me as though I'd said it. "All those liberals should just move to Iraq".
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