Re: Subject/Object Confusion Syndrome [was: Ada Objects Help]

[gijs@mbase97.xs4all.nl (Maarten Landzaat)]

John Volan writes:

>... excellent stuff on why syntactic sugar IS important.

Not many people seem to share this interest in the influence of syntax
on design, readability and other important things.

When I was learning computer science on the university, I always wondered
why I had to say things like

   Show(Window, 33, 45, over_there, graph);

While I could already envision that

   Show my graph in a standard window at position (33,45).

wouldn't be too hard for a computer to translate, especially if I had told him
before that

   Show (object) (how) at position (x,y)

was about to show up somewhere in the program.

I thought that this was a wonderful idea, but no-one seemed to see the
big difference between the two. 

Still I think that ease of use and understandability can make the difference.
Look at the difference between X400 and internet adresses. Look at the
success of PCs after Windows came out, compared to the preceding MSDOS. 


On the same line:

I once mentioned in comp.lang.ada that I found the keyword 'tagged'
a very confusing and non-intuitive way of expressing object-
orientedness. But nobody seemed to mind. I didn't expect that from
people interested in a thoroughly designed language as Ada.


On "robot.mow(the_lawn)":

To my surprise, many projects I've seen that claim to have object 
oriented designs, have 'objects' like Process_Messages, Initialization,
Sender etc. Terrible! It's OK if designs are like this, but calling
them object-oriented is just another way of saying "I don't know what
OO is, and I don't know the difference between a procedure and a
variable". 

Just some thoughts...

-- 
Maarten Landzaat (gijs@mbase97.xs4all.nl)
Amsterdam, Double bass, Fender Jazz Bass, Atari ST, Roland Sound Canvas.
Listen to M-BASE music!