Re: "Object" types vs. "Value" types

[milod@netcom.com (John DiCamillo)]

John G. Volan <John_Volan@ccmail.dayton.saic.com> writes:

[a pretty darn good analysis of object vs. value types deleted]

>(Indeed, it's my humble (and perhaps radical) opinion that the very term
>"object-oriented" is a misnomer.  The paradigm that everybody is so
>gung-ho about these days should have been called "*CLASS*-oriented"
>programming.  A programming language could hypothetically give you
>_objects_ without necessarily giving you _classes_ as well.

Not hypothetically, it's been done: see Self, Cecil, and Obliq.

Given your analysis of object vs. value types, you might enjoy
reading the Obliq paper -- Obliq is a distributed scripting
language in which objects behave pretty much as you described
them.  Obliq objects are all 'network objects' which have not
just state but *location* in a distributed computing environment.
Objects can not be assigned, but they can be *cloned*, even
from one machine to another across a network.

>It's the
>_classes_, and the relationships between them, that give you all that
>juicy inheritance and polymorphism.)

Oh, and you were doing so well, too.  Prototypic object-oriented
languages frequently provide inheritance and polymorphism without
classes.  Some languages implement inheritance through 'delegation'
and effectively allow objects to change their 'type' at run time
by redirecting a 'parent' pointer.

-- 
    ciao,
    milo
================================================================
    John DiCamillo                         Fiery the Angels Fell 
    milod@netcom.com       Deep thunder rode around their shores