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: 103376,e5eb8ca5dcea2827 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Richard D Riehle Subject: Re: Ada OO Mechanism Date: 1999/05/21 Message-ID: <7i28qu$1bc@dfw-ixnews11.ix.netcom.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 480328871 References: <7i05aq$rgl$1@news.orbitworld.net> Organization: Netcom X-NETCOM-Date: Thu May 20 7:19:42 PM CDT 1999 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1999-05-20T19:19:42-05:00 List-Id: In article , dale@cs.rmit.edu.au (Dale Stanbrough) wrote: >" I would like to ask a question, however. In a recent thread > entitled "A question for my personal knowledge" some people were saying > that the Ada OO mechanism was counterintuitive. I tend to agree. This > concern was dismissed by others as being merely "syntactic sugar", and > claims were made that the Ada mechanism is actually easier to use than > the C++ style." > >I actually like the method.operation notation, but I don't find the lack >of it in Ada a really big problem. It _is_ syntactic sugar, in as much as >there are no semantic differences that can be attributed to it. I know some languages in which the verb is the last word of a sentence. Some other languages are subject-verb-object, others have entirely different syntax. So when I hear someone say that Ada is counterintuitive or C++ is counterintuitive or Object COBOL is counterintuitive, I understand that they mean, "This is not the way I am used to thinking about things." That does not mean it is counterintuitive. It simply means they have had difficulty learning a new programming language just as they might have trouble learning a new spoken language. When I hear someone speak of "natural" language, I have to wonder what they are talking about. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the syntax of C++. Nothing wrong or counterintuitive about the syntax of Ada or Eiffel. And there is nothing counterintuitive about the object model of the emerging COBOL standard. If you want to say, "I am having trouble learning this language because it is not what I am used to," fine. That is accepting responsibility for your own difficulty. Lots of great ideas throughout history have been counterintuitive. The Greeks could not conceive of a symbol for zero. Aristotle thought it was intutitive to begin counting from two because there was no point in counting if there only a single instance. Before the invention of calculus, the notion of a limit was counterintuitive. The statement, "I find such and such to be counterintuitive," is a tired old excuse for failing to work hard enough to understand some idea. It does not apply to languages; especially not to programming languages. Richard Riehle richard@adaworks.com http://www.adaworks.com