Question

I am building an application that allows you to apply styles to regular expressions and their capture groups. I have a class called RegexGroup which contains a list of RegexGroup‘s and Regex‘s.

I will make a gui front-end in order to utilize these classes and I started by making a Project class that will be serializable but I realized that a Project class would be exactly the same as the RegexGroup. Is it good or bad practice to create a Project class that is exactly the same as another just because they will be used in different contexts? Or should I just stick with using the RegexGroup class?
Thanks in advance, ell.

note: I had trouble thinking of a title, please correct me if the use of the word “semantics” is incorrect

note: I am currently writing this in java but would this be an appropriate use of typedef in c++?

Edit: The classes are literally exactly the same. Their implementation and interface is completely identical, there are no differences whatsoever.

Answer 1

If a Project is actually a RegexGroup . Then you could just derive from it.
It makes perfect sense, if you say something is another, then that’s where you derive from it.

class Project: public RegexGroup { }

And of course, along the way you might find subtle differences where you could add stuff to the separate classes, or even create a base class for both.

And yes, in c++ you could just use typedef to declare another alias to the same type.

typedef RegexGroup Project;