<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Jul 1, 2016, at 3:24 PM, Rick Mann via swift-users <<a href="mailto:swift-users@swift.org" class="">swift-users@swift.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><span style="font-family: Alegreya-Regular; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">Maybe it's just my C++ upbringing</span></div></blockquote></div><br class=""><div class="">I think that’s it, yes. (No offense intended.) Different languages have very different ways of doing things. C++ has a very intense focus on performance, and that’s led to its object model being very limited (I could say “crippled”) compared to almost any other OO language. Part of this is the way that static methods are really just namespaced functions, not true methods.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><span style="font-family: Alegreya-Regular;" class="">Hmm. It sounds like you're saying it is the way it is as a side-effect of the language implementation.</span><br style="font-family: Alegreya-Regular;" class=""></blockquote><br class=""></div><div class="">No, it’s a side effect of the language <i class="">design</i>. I could go into more detail, but I’d just be repeating what Brent said, basically.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">If you really want to dive into this rabbit hole, I suggest learning about Smalltalk, which is in most respects the original OO language, and the direct ancestor of Obj-C’s OO features. Metaclasses are a pretty deep concept and well worth learning about. (I remember poring over the class hierarchy diagram in the flyleaf of the Smalltalk-80 “Blue Book” as a college student…)</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">—Jens</div></body></html>