[coyotos-dev] IDL compatibility

[Charles Landau]

I'm afraid I contributed to confusion by emphasizing renaming.

Removing a name that is in use is clearly problematic. My situation 
is exceptional because I can find and change all the uses of the 
name. It's unreasonable to expect IDL to handle exceptional 
situations.

At 6:43 PM -0400 6/19/07, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
>if you go to add a method to an existing interface,
>adding it in the middle of the file should not cause other code points
>to break.

This implies that adding a name for a new method does not break the 
IDL "contract".

I see no reason why adding a *new* name for an *existing* method 
should break the contract.

>The name defines the *identity* of the type or the method.

This implies that a method cannot have more than one name. This is a 
misfeature. Having multiple names for the same thing is useful, 
necessary, and perfectly manageable.