Re: Design question: alternative to inheritance.
gas wrote:
I have to store several types of Cells, (call them A, B, ...), where the
number of Cell types is going to increase as we continue development.
Are they different types or different "types"? What's the actual
difference? Do you model the difference in behaviour using virtual
functions (polymorphism) or using some kind of property data and an
internal switch statement[s]?
Among other things, I have to compute inductances between all
combinations of these cells. How the inductance is computed depends
entirely on the type of cell.
So, the computation mechanism will have to either know what type of cell
(the true type) it is (by querying the property data) or require the
cell itself to perform part of the computation thus relying on cells'
polymorphic behaviour, right?
It seems like there must be an elegant solution to this, probably a
design pattern.
Looks like a Visitor pattern...
> The naive solutions I think of have big disadvantages:
If I store a pointer of base classes, calculating the inductances gets
messy and complicated (especially as the number of Cell types
increases). If I store the different cell types seperately, the routines
where I calculate over the different combinations of cells gets ugly, and
scales badly.
So can someone give me a good idea, point me at a good pattern, whatever?
You seem to be in the OOD land here and yours is not really a C++
language problem. Try posting your inquiry to 'comp.object'. There is
also 'comp.software.patterns' newsgroup which might be worth visiting.
V
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