Re: smalltalk vs. Ada

[Wes Groleau <wwgrol@ftw.rsc.raytheon.com>]

> pass around pointers to everything.  Java is also a by-reference language,
> but for half-baked reasons.

In fact, it's "pure-OO, everything's an object claim" is itself only
half-baked.
The programmer before doing anything with any name has to know whether it's
an object or a primitive, since they have different semantics.  A violation
of "information hiding" in the sense that you can do almost nothing with
"employeeNumber" without knowing something about it's implementation.

> Smalltalk (like Java) is a class-oriented language, i.e. everything is an
> instance of a class.  Ada is not a class-oriented language.  Both Smalltalk
> and Java are "pure class-oriented" -- they have a single-rooted class

Again, not really pure.


> Ada has a hierarchial namespace.  In Smalltalk, the class namspace is flat.

Java has a sort of hierarchical namespace, but--here we go again--it's tied
to a particular implementation: a hierarchical directory structure.

-- 
Wes Groleau
http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~wgroleau