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While helping maintain work on an old game's source code, the thorny problem of which data storage format to use propped up, to replace the inflexible one in use with fixed references. There's two main developers, one who wants XML for flexibility, the other a binary format for speed and size.

XML was the main choice, but maintaining the files is trickier than it appears. It's one of the least "human readable" formats I've seen, much more so than HTML, where you know what each tag intrinsically means. This irks the second developer, who would otherwise have accepted a compromise, and there's a stalemate on the issue.

We have skipped around the issue and instead started work on adding other features and bugfixes. The only implementation which I did notice could work was SweetXML, though the time required to set this up wouldn't be as quick.

XML, and it's derivatives such as XAML, need to be easier to read and edit before they can become fully fledged on the web.

All that it takes is people like him and, over time, more and more music becomes unencumbered.

I am surprised that the large corporations have not cottoned onto the idea of free music as an inducement to advertising. Think of the vast sums that they spend just to have their name put in front of people's eyes (think: adverts in football or formula 1 racing). Those cost a lot of money.

What would it cost to commission an orchestra to play Mozart/Beethoven/... and release the MP3s with a short message of the form: ''Beethoven's Moonlight sonata brought to you by XXX, purveyors of fine YYY'' ? If it isn't too intrusive most people would not skip it or edit it from the MP3. The licence could be personal use, no redistribution which means that everyone who wants it should go to their web site and see more adverts for YYY.

1. Pay an orchestra a few thousand pounds to play some classical music
2. Put it up on a web site as a free personal download
3. Lots of people visit the web site
4. Lots of people listen to the name XXX when they listen to the music
5. Those people are more likely to buy XXX's YYY
6. Profit !!!

I'm suggesting they could have used the target type and the signature(method name, the real types of the parameters (or super classes)

Right, but you lose all kinds of compile-time type safety if the language allows your example. Think through the static typing of your example's parse tree -- if we allowed the code you suggest, you also have to allow f(new Object()) to compile, even though there would be no matching method at runtime.

So how do you instantiate a subclass of Thinger? You write another create method.

Not necessarily -- you can have a single method that dispatches to a bunch of different constructors: return foo ? new Quux() : new Fruux();. If you have all the different subclasses in the same package, you can keep the constructors package-private.

If your subclasses are all in different packages, and you want to control instantiation within your project, I suggest you take a look at Macker (see sig).

What artists are you aware of (popular or not) who have come out in favor of music-swapping?

Me!!

Although, with the really lame license I have, I'm desperately wishing for the Creative Commons to get the heck on with it and put their license generator online!

What artists are you aware of (popular or not) who have come out in favor of music-swapping?

Me!!

Although, with the really lame license I have, I'm desperately wishing for the Creative Commons to get the heck on with it and put their license generator online!