I think that much is obvious, but if there were added functionality I'm not so sure that this would be a great idea. If the IntObject were something like CheckedIntObject, which checked assigned values against a valid range and threw an exception when something went out of bounds, it would be a great deal more intuitive and easily extendable with C++ -- after all, it would react exactly like an int, save for the operations one specifies, which makes it easy to typedef and modify if some logic changes.
The objects he mentioned were "Server, Connection, Player, Character, Object, Room, Area". Three of those are not physical objects (Server, Connection, and Player, I think), and depending on the design, physical transformations between the other three may not exist. So data inheritence in that sense is useless because the types do not share data. Since you've stated that you're talking about in-game objects, inheriting data is as easy as writing a copy constructor. I don't think that something so simple needs specific language support. But C will have just as many problems as C++ here -- do you do deep or shallow 'inheritance', and what functions provide it? With C++ you can do deep copying automatically in the copy constructor; this is something that would take one extra step in C, never mind the fact that you'd lose pass-by-value semantics due to the lack of a destructor. IMO, "string" objects are very clearly superior to char * memory pointers because of this.
Correct -- you would lose functionality because it can't look like C++:
[code] typedef mytype int;
void dosomething (mytype &m) { m = 5; }[/quote]
When that typedef is changed to IntObject (or something more functional, like my above CheckedIntObject), you would have to go back and insert functions to perform all of the assignments.
Not just this, but for templated functions that depend on certain operations working across the board with user-defined as well as built-in types, operator overloading is essential. STL algorithms work on all sorts of types because of this, and it's another thing that C can't achieve.
I don't think they'd need to guess -- you would simply overload operator* to handle both matrix and scalar multiplication, so the operations would flow as they do in mathematics; the operations would be type dependant just as they are in the problem domain.
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