Re: Confessions of an "OO Foreigner"

From: Richard (riplin_at_Azonic.co.nz)
Date: 12/31/03 

Date: 30 Dec 2003 20:22:05 -0800

"Peter E.C. Dashwood" <dashwood@enternet.co.nz> wrote

> That is already possible with components. "Web Services" are dependent on
> the adoption of MS .NET

I almost thought it was JeryMouse writing that. In what way is
anything dependent on adopting what MS want to sell you ?

> Your view of OO seems limited to COBOL (where I agree it has not fulfilled
> its promise yet.) In other areas and other languages it HAS fulfilled its
> promise.

That may be partly because most other languages had problems that
needed to be solved and OO did that. Cobol already had solutions to
many of the problems inherent in other languages.

For example operator overloading. If C one could write expressions
involving the built in types. Beyond that, for user defined types, it
was necessary to invent functions specific to each type. This
impacted on the name space making it impractical to have many user
type.

C++ solved that by allowing one set of method names to be used with
any number of different types (using name mangling), and also allowed
expression operators to be methods, also with overloading. Now user
types can be used as if they were built in types via objects.

Cobol never had the problem. User types can be used in any rational
statement. MOVE, ADD, etc don't need to be overloaded to cope with
mixtures of different variable types.

Cobol doesn't wind up with name space pollution problems that occur in
large scale C systems.