From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: f891f,9d58048b8113c00f X-Google-Attributes: gidf891f,public X-Google-Thread: 10261c,2e71cf22768a124d X-Google-Attributes: gid10261c,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,2e71cf22768a124d X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 1014db,9d58048b8113c00f X-Google-Attributes: gid1014db,public From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: next "big" language?? (disagree) Date: 1996/06/09 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 159301929 references: <4p8nbt$3rj@btmpjg.god.bel.alcatel.be> organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.misc,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.pascal.misc Date: 1996-06-09T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Ian Ward said "2. Trying to reuse software for different purpose than it was originally defined." Sure, but abstraction is all about making sure that software you use is maximally reusable, i.e. that the set of purposes for which the software you write is as large as possible. If you have no method for easily enforcing and taking advantage of data abstraction, you cannot easily avoid over-specification and thus narrowing down the scope of possible reuse purposes. Code modification is the worst possible form of reuse (only slight ly better, and sometimes worse than, rewriting stuff from scratch). The whole idea is to reuse code as much as possible WITHOUT ever having to touch it. Sure, in the C world, the normal paradigm for code reuse is precisely to grab source and much with it, and that is not surprising given the language, but it is far from ideal, and from one point ofview you can see a major design goal in modern language design is to eliminate the need for (and therefore the practice of) this kind of source code mucking.