I’m looking for a good name for a “TObject ancestor” class, that would introduce no Pascal baggage: no “Create”, no “Destroy”, no “Free”, etc.
TObject would become a subclass of that root class.
A good name would have to be meaningful as being the “true” root of the class hierarchy, and ideally, it would have to be a name unlikely to conflict with existing class names in existing code (so TRootObject, TBaseObject, etc. likely don’t cut it).
The underlying purpose would be to allow integrating everything in the class system, including objects defined in other languages, and seeing them as objects rather than interfaces (which have a baggage of their own), ie. allow them to have directly accessible fields, allow subclassing, etc.
Any good name ideas?
edit 06-24: Thanks! Quite a lot of comments and suggestions! 😉
To clarify things a bit, the TDWSxxx suggestions are interesting, but semantically-speaking, a TObjet in DWS is an actual DWS object. Also the “ancestor of TObject” would be used to bring in f.i. Java objects, for which TObject methods like .Free or .ClassType f.i. either don’t have a meaning, or would have a different one. One way could be to make all TObject methods virtual and raise exceptions when they’re meaningless, but that would be a runtime solution to what is a compile-time problem.
All this might be a bit fuzzy, as it revolves around things brewing in the lab, and should become clearer in a few weeks time!
FWIW an ancestor of TObject could also be useful in Delphi for special purposes, and could serve as basis for non-reference-counted interfaces (f.i. if you were to introduce a garbage-collection in Delphi).