🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <29250@oasys.dt.navy.mil>, roth@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Pete Roth) writes:
|> [...]
|> A third possibility: the concepts of the language are new, and so the
|> terms "easy to learn/use/describe" are not yet applicable. When we all
|> understand what virtual methods, templates, overloading, private|protected|
|> public, friend, class, etc. mean, *then* the issues will be well defined.

That could explain the traffic on comp.lang.c++ but not that on 
comp.lang.c.  Further, there are other object oriented languages
which don't seem to present such difficulty or cause so much
confusion.  

To be sure, C++ is better than C, and Objective C is better still 
(though not as popular, so its development is falling behind) - but 
the main problem seems to me to be the commitment to backward 
compatibility to C.  

C++ also shares the C characteristic of haphazardness: more and 
more features are "thrown in" rather than a few well designed 
features with greater power.  Hence the presence of all that new 
jargon when a subset should be sufficient.

Finally, if the new concepts are not easy to learn/use/describe,
perhaps the concepts are not worth the effort.  There are other
ways to provide reuse of code, encapsulation, and the other abstract 
objectives which object oriented concepts supposedly promote which may 
be easier to learn/use/describe.  Functional languages are a possibility 
in this regard.

This discussion only has indirect relevance to Fortran.  Eventually,
Fortran implementations will require extensions to provide some
of these features and the observation of the mistakes mad in other
languages will be of importance.  As far as I can tell, it is too
early yet to state conclusively whether OOP is even a good idea
or not (as compared to alternatives like generic procedures or
functional extensions).  In any case, followups are directed to
comp.lang.misc.

-- 
J. Giles