Re: Real OO

[jsa@organon.com (Jon S Anthony)]

In article <68P6zfWk3RB@herold.franken.de> jhd@herold.franken.de (Joachim Durchholz) writes:

> Caught me - it's actually a few years since I looked at anything that  
> related to Ada. Humm... let's see... the book says it's from 1981, and  
> I bought it shortly after it was available. It's *really* been a long  
> time. And now that I look at it, that ancient standard actually allows  
> single routines to be compiled - I stand corrected.

That would be a "pre" standard.  The Ada83 standard was in 1983.  It's
amazing how ancient all this stuff is.  There are no new ideas...
(the original Eiffel stuff is what? circa '83/'85?)


> > So, why not use classes for modules?  Basically because that is not
> > really their major semantic intent (not just in "programming" but in
> > any taxonomic modeling scenario).  Sure, you can say, "so what?", and
> > pull a Humpty Dumpty and further say, "in this nook of the world, they
> > do have this intent."  Fine.  But saying it's so doesn't make it so.
> > And I haven't seen a convincing argument for this position (maybe
> > there is one, and I just haven't seen it...)
> 
> Well, it's the same with functions and routines. They were introduced  
> to reuse code (rings a bell, doesn't it?). But nowadays I find myself  
> using them just for naming a chunk of code.
> This is a blatant abuse of the concept of a subroutine; after all, I  

Why do you say that?  I see no "abuse" of the concept at all.
Subprograms stand for a piece of functionality.  Whether you use it
zero times, once, or a zillion times has no bearing on this.  How this
is implmented also has no bearing on the _concept_.  I am speaking
about what it is typically taken to stand for in a conceptual sense.
So, no, there is no similarity here...


> > Sounds like a subsystem.  And it would be nice to have some construct
> > with which you could express this collection of classes within the
> > model that contains the particular notion of class with which you're
> > working.  A construct whose job it was to collect and organize sets of
> > arbitrary sorts of things...
> 
> Well, in Eiffel, these are called clusters. They aren't really part of  
> the language standard, but ISE's compiler organizes the classes into  
> clusters, and the other vendors follow suit here. It's somewhat alike  
> the convention of naming include files *.h in C - never formalized,  
> but everybody adheres.

Yes, I know.  They are (typically) part of LACE (hmmm, if they are
actually called clusters, maybe the extra language environment that
the implementation is offering has to be called LACE...)  And since
it is an add on, it is not as strong a notion and is YALL (yet another
little language)...

/Jon
-- 
Jon Anthony
Organon Motives, Inc.
1 Williston Road, Suite 4
Belmont, MA 02178

617.484.3383
jsa@organon.com