On Mar 16, 2007, at 12:46 AM, TRANS wrote:
> On 3/15/07, Tom Pollard <tomp / earthlink.net> wrote:
>> Is 'multiton' really the right name for this?  I've used a pattern
>> much like this in different contexts, but would usually describe such
>> objects as 'immutable'.  If I can ask, what practical use cases did
>> you have in mind for this?
>
> Well, let me start with this:
>
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiton_pattern

Yes, I had seen that when I googled 'multiton'.  As wikipedia  
articles go, it doesn't look particularly authoritative; in  
particular, it contains no references to places where the pattern has  
been defined or used.  Almost all of the other relevant hits I got  
were Ruby usages, which is a bad sign, because I'm sure this is a  
widely used pattern in many (most?) object-oriented languages.

> And you are absolutely right. It is related to immutability --it is in
> fact how one generally goes about creating immutable objects.

It seems surprising, then, that such a commonly used pattern doesn't  
have an accepted name that you could have adopted.  Why not call it  
'Immutable'?

(I like the idea of having a mixin available in the standard library  
to make this easy to use, I'm just not crazy about the name.)

Cheers,

Tom