object newbie

["Chip Sample" <sample(at)idcomm.com>]

I must admit that based on comments from this list, I have experimented with
the object features of IDL for the past week or so, and have implemented
them in a few places in a fairly big widget code I have written.

My initial observations are that there seems to be less of a temptation to
use common blocks when objects are used.  On the other hand my first
impression was that an object is a structure whose fields can not be
accessed until you write additional "methods" to get at each and every damn
one of them.  So my object was littered with about 25 "methods" just so I
could pry the data out of the object.

I eventually came on a work around to write a "proto_object" with a method
allowing you to pass a string containing a tag name which returns the
contents of the field with that tag name.  This "proto_object" is inherited
by all other objects I create just so I can use this method.  Along the way
I found that the TAG_NAMES function in IDL doesn't work for objects so I had
to create one.  It basically copies the object structure into a regular
structure so the TAG_NAMES can be used.

Am I making this too hard?

Chip