class society?

class society?

[Mark S. Hathaway]

Hello all,

Has anyone seriously considered the idea, now that object-oriented design
is understood pretty well, of developing one set of classes which would be
held in public domain and implemented by all the language developers, so
that software developers won't have the mind-bogglingly difficult task of
learning 15 different sets of libraries of thousands of classes, types,
procedures, functions, constants, etc.?

It seems this and the emerging standard for interfaces (ILU for one) would
make life much easier for all who really work at developing software.

I know some languages still don't have inheritance and some have single-
inheritance and some have multiple-inheritance.  Could that be overcome in
the design/selection of the class tree?

No bugs,

 
Mark S. Hathaway      <hathawa2@muvms6.mu.wvnet.edu>

Re: class society?

[Paul Johnson]

Mark S. Hathaway (hathawa2@muvms6.wvnet.edu) wrote:

> Hello all,

> Has anyone seriously considered the idea, now that object-oriented design
> is understood pretty well, of developing one set of classes which would be
> held in public domain and implemented by all the language
> developers,

It was seriously considered for about 15 seconds at a meeting of NICE
(the Eiffel Consortium) a couple of years ago :-)

NICE is pushing forwards with a kernel standard for Eiffel, but data
structures are not in the frame.  Contrary to what you say, there is
no consensus on how to do data structure libraries.  As for anything
above that, forget it.

The nearest thing to a standard across Ada, Eiffel and C++ would be
the Booch libraries.  Implementations now exist for all three languages
(although I have heard dire stories about the Ada implementation).

Paul.

-- 
Paul Johnson            | GEC-Marconi Ltd is not responsible for my opinions. |
+44 245 473331 ext 3245 +-----------+-----------------------------------------+
Work: <paj@gec-mrc.co.uk>           | You are lost in a twisty maze of little
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Re: class society?

[Pat Rogers]

In article <5556@gec-mrc.co.uk> paj@gec-mrc.co.uk (Paul Johnson) writes:
>
>
>The nearest thing to a standard across Ada, Eiffel and C++ would be
>the Booch libraries.  Implementations now exist for all three languages
>(although I have heard dire stories about the Ada implementation).

There is a world of difference in the design of the C++ and Ada Booch
components (Ada83, that is :).  The Ada version uses an approach in which
each data type (Bags, Queues, etc.) includes the representation code for
the type -- that is, each form of queue implements a queue, each form of
bag implements a bag, and so on.  Multiply the number of forms by the number
of abstractions and you're talking about a fair amount of code.  The C++ 
version is not designed the same way.  It uses aggregation to share
representations across forms, cutting the code size dramatically.  The hype
surrounding the code reduction from the use of inheritance is just that.  
There's nothing wrong with the approach used by the C++ version -- it is just 
different. There are no "dire problems" with the Ada version that result 
from the language.  I prefer the C++ *design* for various reasons, but it is
mostly not a function of the language.  The Ada83 version could have been 
designed in largely the same manner.   The Ada9X version should exhibit all the 
advantages of the newer (C++) design, as well as the advantages of a newer
language design. (several :) )


Pat Rogers
progers@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu
Team Ada
-- 
Pat Rogers, Team Ada
progers@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu