Wolfgang Thaller
The example implementation already had a "Widget" type; a Widget type would be necessary when you want to have heterogenous lists of widgets. That's why somebody brought up the idea of having the toWidget and fromWidget functions; Nobody protested when the idea was first proposed, so I assumed that it was agreed.
By itself, there's no problem having a Widget type and to/fromWidget operations. After all, with _only_ those two operations, there's not that much you can do with them. But, the moment we add additional operations which act on objects of type Widget and not on objects in the Widget class, my gut tells me there will be problems. I was keeping quiet until such operations were proposed since it'd be easier to point out problems with concrete examples in front of us. -- Alastair Reid alastair@reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk Reid Consulting (UK) Limited http://www.reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk/alastair/