[tcljava-dev] TclObject final?

[Neil M. <ne...@cs...>]

I'm trying some preliminary investigation as to whether Feather [1]
would be feasible in Java for use in TclJava. However, I have
immediately run up against a problem. TclObject is declared final,
meaning that I can't subclass it or override its methods in any way.
Feather needs to change the behaviour of some of these methods for
opaque objects to work. Is there any chance of TclObject being changed
to non-final? I realise that declaring it final prevents anyone from
messing around with the implementation, but surely if somebody (like me)
wants to, then that person must take full responsibility for the
consequences of their actions - i.e. making sure any changes they make
don't break the interpreter the new object is passed to.

Any comments? As Paul managed to mock up a proof of concept of Feather
for the C version, I imagine that this can be done in normal Tcl.

Neil.

[1] "Feather - Teaching Tcl Objects to Fly" - Paul Duffin. Paper
presented at the 7th USENIX Tcl/Tk conference. Available from the USENIX
website somewhere.