From: pmacdona@sanjuan (Peter MacDonald) Subject: Re: ALPHA-pl11 available on nic: C++ support Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1993 02:43:30 GMT
In article <4e2l03Lyd6i500@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> ikluft@uts.amdahl.com (Ian Kluft) writes:
...
>
>Objective-C is also a hybrid language. In this case, Smalltalk was grafted
>onto C. They paid a lot of attention to making good algorithms for the
>implementation. But you still pretty much have to know both C and Smalltalk
>to completely understand Objective-C.
>
>Back in 1990, when I did my masters thesis on a subject related to this, it
>was not clear which would win between C++ and Objective-C. Now in 1993,
>there is no question that C++ has become the better-known and more-developed
>language of the two.
I to did some research into this. There is no doubt that the real OO types
demand Smalltalk (and Objective-C, if C type pgming is absolutely required).
In fact, they tend to sneer at C++ as something of a joke due to the
lack of free typing or typelessness (outside of templates) and the complexity/
ambiguity of its syntax.
That said, they are almost as alone as the Prolog people.
I don't think there is any question of "should Linux go C++". It is already
done. And I doubt seriously that it will be to long before at the very
least function overloading is used, and probably subclassing.
Sure C++ is not the perfect OO language. Neither is Objective-C (no exception
handling, and I think no Garbage Collection). For that matter, neither is
Smalltalk (no GC). But C++ is the defacto standard, which is probably the only
kind of standard that makes any sense today. People are flocking to learn
it, and it is readily available across most platforms. It is a (dirty) superset
of C. And as long as very deep levels of inheritance (say, greater than 2 :-),
and more obscure features are avoided, it should help design, not hinder it.
Peter