First step into covariant world

It is interesting how given concepts of programming languages made their way into the mainstream — I was able to observe how functions from “uhm, do we really need them?” perspective became first class citizens (“what, you cannot pass a function to a function?”).

The next thing on my watch list is covariance and contravariance — they were finally introduced in C#, but sadly, only partially.

Since I am working back and forth now on improving support of functions in Skila it was a hard to miss an opportunity to finally make this happen:

struct Foo 
  def virtual get() Foo = new Foo();
end

struct Bar : Foo
  def override get() Bar = new Bar();
end

You don’t have to mark those methods in any special way, compiler knows you are overriding the method, so you can return a derived type in a derived class. That’s it — done!

Adding this/self (self reference to current type instance) and THIS/SELF (per analogy, current type) is right behind the corner. In a way it will be a return to one of the COOL features, yet with more flexibility.

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