What's so great about dynamic binding?

I notice that a whole slew of "hot topics" in object-oriented design were
listed and that about half of them started with the word "dynamic". This
concept has always bothered me, because dynamic means interpreted, at some
level, at least with current machine architectures. If this is true then
the language should be powerful enought to NOT support dynamic binding, yet
you can implement any dynamic method you want IN it.


I have been programming professionally in C++ for about a year now,
implementing a GUI library, and have used exactly ONE virtual function. I
also did a rather quick test - by use of a "pointer to a function" in that
base class, I was able to eliminate even that virtual function. The big
loss here is that every sub class needed a constructor to fill in that field
with the correct pointer (the sort of thing we need better languages to
automate), but I quite successfully fully duplicated the function of the
dynamic-binding with a static langague. The more I work with it, the more I
have been convinced that an exclusively static-bound language is the way to
go.


But since I have been posting on this Bulletin Board I have been flamed
mercilessly as an Ignoramous for not seeing the marvelous benefits of
dynamic binding. I'm sorry, I'm blind. I do not see them.


Am I missing something? Please enlighten me. Or does even a single person
out there think the same as me? And is this a hot topic in langauge design?
--
Bill Spitzak | spitzak@girtab.usc.edu | spitzak@mcimail.com


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