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Date: 22 Jun 93 18:31:25 GMT
From: mcsun!chsun!bernina!neptune!santas@uunet.uu.net  (Philip Santas)
Subject: Re: Gauntlet thrown: OOPSLA program
Message-ID: <1993Jun22.183125.28689@neptune.inf.ethz.ch>
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <C8z9K3.ML8@cs.uiuc.edu> johnson@cs.uiuc.edu (Ralph Johnson) writes:
>
>Ada is not an object-oriented language, but it looks like Ada 9X will be.
>OOPSLA is about object-oriented programming, so it is natural that most
>of the OOPSLA community has not been using Ada.  

This is why most of the OOPSLA community has the problems which users
of ADA (or ADA-like languages, or languages with similar features) do not have.
This is not supposed to mean that ADA is a super-language (it is not), but 
rather that the features it supports are the ones that make this 
kind of languages to be powerful enough, and quite successful.
Anything to learn from this?

>But lots of people try
>to use Ada in an object-oriented style, so I have been a little surprised
>that there is as little interaction between the two communities as there
>has been.  

I'm wondering what you mean by "use Ada in an object-oriented style".
It turns out that the new OOL's have incorporated many features found
in languages like ADA.

>This probably due to the fact that the Ada community already
>has its own conferences, so they are not as willing to go to a conference
>where only some of the material is relevant to them.  

It is because they have nothing to gain from "discussions" on topics like:

- what is inheritance?
- what is object?
- what is a RW object?
- what is RW in OOP?
- how can we have homogeneous lists which are not homogeneous?
- how can we do static type inference to a language (like Self) where static
    type-inference is impossible?
- how can we prove that Self needs static type inference, and still make
    people believe it?
- here is a "proof" that a system, which takes some hours to type-check
    'hallo world' and needs several GBs of memory, is useful!

and the rest, all in the same style.

>Nevertheless, I
>think that there is a lot to be gained from cross-fertilization.

Are you saying that this year's OOPSLA is not going to be so boring
as the ones of the last 4-5 years (as far as I can reason from the proceedings,
and discussions with other experts)?

Philip Santas

  "In an evolving universe those who stand still are really moving backwards"
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email: santas@inf.ethz.ch                                Philip Santas
Mail: Dept. Informatik                     Institute of Scientific Computation
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