Re: Eiffel and Java

[ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)]

Sacha@easynet.fr (Vincent WEBER) writes:
>  By the way, one more thing : I just had a look at ADA 95 and it's "OO" model. 
>Even if I admit it is powerful, I think it's very heavy.

This puzzles me considerably.
The Ada 95 OO model is essentially the same as the C++ model,
restricted to single inheritance.
Unlike OOP in Smalltalk, Simula 67, and the proposed OOP extensions
to Pascal, objects need not be referred to via pointers.
The syntax is very lightweight as well.

>However, one thing interested me : Ada 
>fanatics claim that the dot notation break the symetry of natural operation, 
>and that Ada's model of dynamic bindings in all the parameters of a procedure 
>is better (that is, writing for instance Add(VectorA, VectorB) instead of 
>VectorA.Plus(VectorB). I don't know what to think about this controversy. Any 
>idea ?

(a) Where did you find any Ada fanatics?  People are usually drawn to
    Ada because they are aware of their own fallibility.

(b) It baffles me that this late in the millenium, some people think that
    whether you write
	f(x)
    or  x.f
    is something important.  In the Pop family of languages, the two
    notations have been identical for 3 decades or more.  There was a
    paper from Xerox on uniform reference which probably needs republishing.

(c) What _does_ matter is semantics, and here C++ runs into a problem that
    Ada 95 avoids:  an expresssion "a < b" could be interpreted _either_
    as a call to a function operator <(a, b) _or_ as a method call
    a.operator <(b).  This can interact with inheritance in surprising ways.

>  Thanks to anyone that would help to elect my favourite language :) Currently, 
>I believe that Eiffel is the best OOPL, even if the reality of industry force 
>me to live the nightmare of C++ everyday :)

It sounds as though you have already made your choice.
And that without looking at CLOS, or Sather, or Self, or Cecil, or ...

-- 
Mixed Member Proportional---a *great* way to vote!
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.