From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: fac41,b87849933931bc93 X-Google-Attributes: gidfac41,public X-Google-Thread: 109fba,b87849933931bc93 X-Google-Attributes: gid109fba,public X-Google-Thread: 1108a1,b87849933931bc93 X-Google-Attributes: gid1108a1,public X-Google-Thread: 114809,b87849933931bc93 X-Google-Attributes: gid114809,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,b87849933931bc93 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: f43e6,b87849933931bc93 X-Google-Attributes: gidf43e6,public From: "Stanley R. Allen" Subject: Re: OO, C++, and something much better! Date: 1997/01/29 Message-ID: <32EFB3D4.167E@hso.link.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 213060272 references: <32EB753C.678B@jmpstart.com> content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii organization: NASA/Johnson Space Center mime-version: 1.0 newsgroups: comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.smalltalk,comp.lang.eiffel,comp.lang.ada,comp.object,comp.software-eng x-mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (X11; I; IRIX 5.3 IP19) Date: 1997-01-29T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Robert A Duff wrote: > > Interfacing between two different languages is a serious problem. The > design of Ada 95 goes to a great deal of trouble to make interfacing > between Ada and C (etc) as easy as possible, but it's still painful. > Silly little things, like whether strings are null-terminated, or carry > their bounds with them. > > So I don't buy the idea that you can just choose whatever language is > best for each module, and then paste them together. In the future this may be commonplace and quite easy, if everyone can specify their interfaces in a 'neutral' language like CORBA's IDL. I don't particularly care for IDL (its type system is very weak), but it may do the job just fine for the next 10 years or so. It would be nice to see all new API's specified in something like IDL rather than some particular programming language. For example, it would help a great deal if all GUI and OS APIs had 3GL-neutral IDL descriptions. Too much time, money, and intellectual capital is wasted on these ridiculous interface issues. Much of my debugging time is spent chasing the kinds of interface problems Bob Duff is talking about. Having a neutral interface language with standard mappings would go a long way to improving the programming landscape. CORBA IDL may herald a renaissance of multi-linguism in software development, something which has been slowly dying over the last decade, mainly due to the need to conform to C as the least-common denominator for interfacing. -- Stanley Allen mailto:s_allen@hso.link.com "The Road Ahead": perspectives from one of capitalism's winners.