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.