Documentation for Ice 3.4. The latest release is Ice 3.7. Refer to the space directory for other releases.

In addition to interfaces, Slice permits the definition of classes. Classes are like interfaces in that they can have operations and are like structures in that they can have data members. This leads to hybrid objects that can be treated as interfaces and passed by reference, or can be treated as values and passed by value.

Classes support inheritance and are therefore polymorphic: at run time, you can pass a class instance to an operation as long as the actual class type is derived from the formal parameter type in the operation's signature. This also permits classes to be used as type-safe unions, similarly to Pascal's discriminated variant records.

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