Re: friend classes in ada95

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

On Thu, 20 Apr 2000, Robert Dewar wrote:
> In article <8dmj62$4i7$1@wanadoo.fr>,
>   "Jean-Pierre Rosen" <rosen.adalog@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> > i.e. that a program is
> > no more defined as a sequence of actions to be performed by a
> > computer, but as a representation, a modelization, of the real
> > world. FWIW.
> 
> No, that's much too broad, the object oriented approach is
> only one particular way of representing or modeling the
> world.
> 
> COBOL programs have traditionally modeled the accounting
> world for example, pretty literally, but often in ways that
> are purely procedural (the real world does contain procedures
> as well as objects :-)
> 
> Indeed this points out the ultimate weakness of relying on the
> OO paradign for everything.
> 
> Obviously you can do any computing task using any computation
> approach, we all know that.
> 
> Therefore, Q.E.D. you can do anything using an object oriented
> approach, so we all know that too, and it proves nothing.
> 
> The point is that the OO approach is most often useful ONLY
> if it does indeed model the real world, so if your real world
> problem is not naturally "object oriented", then forcing it
> into the OO paradigm may considerably distort the model.

I would have guessed that you are American, not Scandinavian :-)

For those who don't get the reference, the Scandinavians, that is, the 
designers of Simula and BETA, refer to two different views of OO which
they call the "Scandinavian" and "American" views, where the Scandinavian 
view is concerned with "real world" (whatever that is) modeling and the 
American with using OO as a software engineering tool concerned with 
the structure of the source code. This is an oversimplification of course,
if you want the full story read one of the books by Madsen on the topic,
like the BETA book.

Since I have no idea what this "real world" is and how it helps me write
code, I'm pretty much an American. 

I'm certainly looking forward to reading Robert's contrary views on OOP. 
I suspect that we won't be able to get a hard and fast definition of OOP 
or OOPL that everyone agrees on.

-- Brian