Re: A bad counterintuitive behaviour of Ada about OO

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

W dniu czwartek, 7 sierpnia 2014 10:58:20 UTC+2 użytkownik J-P. Rosen napisał:

> Rather say that there are two kinds of OO programming languages: those
> that consider OOP as one tool among others, to be used when (and only
> when) appropriate, and the "pure" OO languages where OOP is the only way
> to do everything.

Yes. But this division is completely orthogonal to whether the OOP support is consistent or broken. That is, taking into account these two aspects we have not two, but four kinds of programming languages and Ada belongs to the category of "broken support for OOP as one tool among others".
In practice, these divisions are not strict and different languages can be placed in a continuous space and compared relative to each other. For example, C++ also considers OOP as just one tool among others, but supports it in a more consistent way than Ada.

> Ada clearly belongs to the first category.

Yes. As many other languages.

> Of course, there are similarly two kinds of programmers.

Yes.

> You belong to
> the second category

I did not write anything that would allow you to make such claims. In fact, I find myself using OOP very rarely in my current projects - but when I do it I expect consistent support.

Just as an example - one of my current projects (in C++) has 15k lines of code, there are only 60 lines containing the "virtual" keyword (this indicates dispatching operation) and I use it consistently not only in base classes, but in derived too, so in total there are only a few dispatching operations in the whole project.
So, no, I am definitely not an OOP extremist.

> but some of us belong to
> the first one.

And you are OK with broken support for the tool that you are using occasionally? This is dangerous as it allows to justify broken support for every other language feature - after all, every one is just "one tool among others". Ada should do better than that.

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.msobczak.com * http://www.inspirel.com