Re: Definition of Buzzwords: "Object-Oriented"

[jih@usl.UUCP (Juha I. Heinanen)]

I agree with Robert Stroud that from the programmer's point of view it
was a serious mistake to include the privite part in the package
specification and thus force the programmer to tell the memory
representation of a private type before writing the package body.  Since
the algorithms depend on memory representation and vice versa it is in
practice impossible to separate the specification from the
implementation.  This ruins the whole idea of data abstraction with
separate compilation.  

What comes to Modula-2, I wouldn't have placed any restrictions on the
memory representation of opaque types.  If the actual representation
turns out to fit in one word then that is fine.  If not I would have
made the compiler implicitly declare a pointer variable that points to
the real memory representation and implicitly allocate the object from
the heap.  Similarly all direct references to the memory representation
would have been implicitly changed to pointer references.  This
arrangement would have freed the programmer from the artificial
introduction of pointer variables.

                                 Juha Heinanen

USL, P.O. Box 44330, Lafayette, LA 70504,  tel. (318)231-5345
UUCP:  {ut-sally, akgua}!usl!jih      ARPA:  usl!jih@ut-sally

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Will this be appended?