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Not to mention the fact that they completely ignored class methods. No, static methods do not count.

• i386 14y ago
  Out of curiosity, why do statics not count for class methods?
  • malbs 14y ago
    class methods are virtual
  • hboon 14y ago
    They are closer to global functions that are attached to classes and don't support inheritance the same way as instance methods. e.g. if a subclass implements a static function with the same signature as its parent, and you call it with the parent class, it invokes the parent class version instead of the subclass version. Class-side methods in Smalltalk are inherited, working with classes (as an object) is analogous to how instance-side methods work with instances (also objects). So e.g implementing and using factory methods are simpler in Smalltalk and similar languages. Edit: grammer and typos.
• jcampbell1 14y ago
  The only difference I know of is that you can override inherited class methods, but not in Java. Is that really an important feature that you use? I suppose you could use it to do "factory" stuff, without an actual factory class.
  • malbs 14y ago
    exactly! Imagine my surprise when I disovered Delphi has class methods too, but they were not copied to C#. I guess most of the time they're not particularly useful, but when you do need to create some factory code, having pure virtual class methods (template methods), is really useful. Downside w/ Delphi is the metaclasses do not implicitly exist - you have to manually define it, eg TMyObjectClass = class of TMyObject; They should just be implicity, when you define a class, the metaclass is defined too. I guess when they first designed it memory constraints were still a consideration