Re: pointers & OOP

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On Fri, 7 May 1999 dennison@telepath.com wrote:

> In article <Pine.BSF.4.10.9905062007340.27089-100000@shell5.ba.best.com>,
>   Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 5 May 1999, John Robinson wrote:
> >
> > I think your original claim about the inability to do OOP without pointers
> > is more convincing in the weak version too, since there are some things
> > like heterogeneous collections (in general) and access discriminant tricks
> > (in Ada 95) that require access types, but its obvious that you can use
> > OOP features in a pointerless program. How much OOP do you have to use for
> > an application to be a major OOP application?
> 
> Perhaps the source of confusion is that dynamic dispatching from collections

Dynamic dispatching *period*. Ada-83 is even weaker than C in providing
the ability to fake OOP nicely, since it doesn't have access to
subprogram. 

> is the main new thing that Ada95 tagged types bring to the table. The other
> typical facets of OOP can be accomplished in Ada83 using minor tricks. So if
> you are going to use Ada95 to do things you just couldn't do Ada83, you are
> typically going to be using pointers.

But you don't need pointers to classwide types to get dynamic dispatch. 

FWIW, my "OO" programs in Ada do make use of pointers.

-- Brian