Look at this C++ code, for example:

DynamicAny any(”42?);
int i = any; // i == 42
any = 65536;
std::string s = any; // s == “65536”
char c = any; // too big, throws RangeException

or this:

std::cout << RecordSet(session, “SELECT * FROM Table”);

You may want to take a look at POCO

To be honest, coming from the power of Lisp’s macro systems, the power of the C++ template system is somewhat diminished in my eyes. I know it’s Turing-complete, and you can do a lot with template metaprogramming, but the amount of code and cleverness it usually takes is daunting.

Thank you for the recommendation, though, and I will look into that book next. It sounds interesting. In particular, I found that he apparently implements a solution in that book for one of my complaints – C++’s lack of multimethods. I’ll have to see how they work.

As for how it’d be implemented, most Smalltalker’s abuse OrderedCollection for just about everything, but there are specialized collections in the image for just about every need.

Of course, you do have to store them somehow. A Puzzle object contains Cells, sure – but how does it access its cells, how does it load/store its configurations, etc. Those are implementation details, to be sure, but they do have to be resolved. As I’m digging around, though, I do appreciate your point – that these are ultimately secondary concerns.

I’m not using many plugins – WP-Syntax for syntax highlighting, WP-Polls for the poll on the right, and “Share This” for the little widget at the bottom of each entry. You’re probably noticing the template, which is called “Spotlight” – it was just the first somewhat nice one I saw on themes.wordpress.net, but it’s growing on me.

“how do I store *puzzles*? A multi-dimensional array of *Cell* objects?”

How about in a Puzzle object, that contains Cells? At least, that’s how this Smalltalker would start out.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

There were just things some things that popped up which I didn’t have time to dig around and fix. For example, cached pages started not getting updated; I’d delete spam comments and trackbacks in the admin, and they were gone from the database, but the comments still showed up on blog pages. This was probably due to some change on my host, but Typo didn’t have any way to diagnose it – telling it to delete the cache didn’t help, and there weren’t any helpful errors that I saw.

Also, many of the themes I installed were buggy, but I realize that’s not your fault. Again, this is stuff that I probably could have figured out and fixed myself, I just didn’t have the time to spend on it. And it’s not like WordPress has been perfect so far, it’s just been easier to setup and fix.

I believe the version I was using was 4.1.

I wish you guys the best, and I hope to return to Typo one day.

Clarification: I was first using 2.6.0, and then upgraded earlier this year to 4.1.

I’d be grateful if you could let me know what annoyed you most and which version you were using.