Understanding the Traits Component

Note

TODO: an actual tutorial, for now the main points are listed.

• Types are often viral because interactions between classes happen through the types known to those classes, e.g., for an object of type T to interact with an object of type U, T must be able to understand the types U uses to access state and vice versa.

• With many Chemist objects actually consisting of a number of different classes, we need to synchronize types across those objects.

• Also used for the template meta-programming to ensure const-ness is correct.

• Traits allows a single source of truth for types associated a class.