Re: Building blocks (Was: Design By Contract)

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shellx.best.com>]

On 8 Sep 1997, Paul Johnson wrote:
> Please don't judge a language feature (*any* feature) by its implementation
> in C++.  The language is a bodge.

If you read comp.lang.ada, you might learn that some people find certain
aspects of C++ interesting, perhaps even worthy of being considered for 
inclusion in a future Ada :-). I suggest that you abandon your programming
language religion when posting to multiple children of comp.lang. 

> Take a look at Eiffel instead.  

I have. And I used Sather for quite a while too. I find Ada superior to
both, though I confess that I find Sather iterators extremely elegant and 
more importantly I wish garbage collection was the "default" for Ada.
I think the module-type conflation is really confusion, and that OO is not 
the uber-paradigm which subsumes all others. 

> And if you do it in C++ I'd agree with you.  However in Eiffel you will
> find that MI, templates and exceptions all fit together in a unified
> whole.  In fact the Eiffel exception mechanism is superior to the Ada one
> because it is built on a theoretical model of software engineering.

I find it rather funny that in one post you say you don't use Ada, and
can't understand the idioms for doing MI in Ada, but somehow you just
"know" that it is a fact that the Eiffel exception mechanism is superior 
to Ada's. Ada exceptions can do everything Eiffel's can and more. (And
before that "goto" vs "structured" analogy gets going, I find the extra 
power useful).

Eiffel's inheritance is based on a theoretical model which later turned out 
to be unsafe. A (theoretical) fix was proposed, and never implemented. And
now we have another theoretical fix. So much for Eiffel theoretical
models! :-)

-- Brian