Re: Unimplemented methods

[Fred Kiefer]

Nicola Pero wrote:
> in conclusion, my opinion for unimplemented facilities is:
> 
>  - methods setting unessential properties of gui elements should be there
>    with an implementation doing nothing, so that ported applications still
>    run properly even if they are unimplemented;
> 
>  - methods doing something essential should *not* be there at all.
>    they should be commented out in the header file as well.
>    that will help people trying to port code, so they know immediately
>    what methods will cause problems, because the compiler will emit
>    warnings when they call the methods.

At first I thought that this is a very reasonable solution. Than doubts
came, who should decide which methods are essential which aren't? After
more thinking I would even reverse the argument. 

In the last year I did a lot of review of old GNUstep code, often code
that has been around for some time. What was typical here was code that
did things that shouldn't be done at that place, but was supposed to be
in another class. Probably at the time the code was written this other
class was totally missing, so who ever needed its behaviour wrote it
himself, locally. I had to do a lot of reorganization of code to put
this right again. So my feeling to this question is that all classes and
methods of OpenStep (and MacOSX) should be present in  GNUstep, even
with no code behind it. When there is no method, nobody can call it and
also nobody will implement it. Who ever needs it wont implement that
method, but do some strange workaround somewhere else. 

Of course Nicola is right that all those methods should warn users that
they are not implemented. But where should we stop? If there is some
partial implementation, as is often the case in GNUstep, shouldn't we
warn also? What we need is different levels of warnings, that can be
switched on and off with compile time or runtime switches. We could use
NSDebugLog for this.
Even essential methods should be defined, and anybody who wants to know
why her application looks or behaves different in GNUstep switches on
this reporting and the missing methods show themselves.

Fred