Warp wrote:
>   When you go to a grocery store to buy food, you don't have to care how
> the grocery store works internally. You just use its "interface" to buy the
> food and that's it. The store takes care of its own inner functionality.

And remember that the store also has food ordering at the back end, 
accounting, paying employees, filing taxes, cleaning the floors, predicting 
how much food needs to be ordered, etc. *that* is where the modularity comes 
in, and the OO, even more than just "buying food". A program that only deals 
with one kind of interaction is like a database with only one primary key.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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Warp wrote:
> David H. Burns <dhb### [at] cherokeetelnet> wrote:
>> *I* don't think, naturally or otherwise, like any OOP programming I have 
>> seen!! You may be trying to
>> read your on programming philosophy onto the world, or we may be of 
>> different genera. :)
> 
>   You clearly don't understand what "object-oriented programming" means.
> Then you come here to tell us that you don't want it, whatever it might be.
> 
I have seen a number of object oriented programs. And I did not like 
what I say.
They are pretty nigh incomprehensible to me. I know they were produced 
(or claimed to
be produced) by object oriented programming. Now it's true that the 
process of programming
is different from the program produced, but the product that I see gives 
little indication that
  it was produced by thought processes like mine. I don't presume to say 
that you don't naturally
think like object oriented programming, but since I have more experience 
*my*mind than you,
I can assure you that I don't! I definitely would not like to see the 
Pov-Ray scripting language
turn into something like those examples of OOP I have seen.

BTW I forgot one other possibility: You might be a genus. I once worked 
with an old fellow who
was a near genus (at least) in programming. His mind seemed to work in a 
way in almost diametrically
opposed to mine. Any time we tried to work together, we started with an 
argument but ended
accomplishing our task. He' dead now; I wonder what he would have 
thought of OOP, it might
have been his native language. :)

David

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David H. Burns <dhb### [at] cherokeetelnet> wrote:
> >   You clearly don't understand what "object-oriented programming" means.
> > Then you come here to tell us that you don't want it, whatever it might be.
> > 
> I have seen a number of object oriented programs.

  Ironically, by saying that you are only *confirming* what I just wrote.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> David H. Burns <dhb### [at] cherokeetelnet> wrote:
>> What I have seen of OOP
> 
>   Clearly you haven't. You don't even understand what "object-oriented
> programming" means.
> 
OK so I don't. Tell me. :)

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Warp wrote:
>   Yes, you do. Maybe you didn't understand the "on every possible platform
> which your kernel can be compiled for" part?

I'm just saying that's not really well-defined in *C*. It's 
compiler-specific, not C as such.

>   The difference is probably that neither FORTH nor Ada have the same amount
> of libraries, platform support or optimizing compilers, nor are they nearly
> as popular.

True. And those things feed on each other.

>   Of course in C. And "undefined behavior" can also mean "works as desired
> in this platform".

That's what I'm distinguishing. That's why I say C, as such, isn't very good 
for that sort of thing. You can do it, but only because you look at what 
your particular compiler generated for some piece of otherwise undefined 
code, and say "yes, that's what I'd like."

> When you know what the compiler is doing, and you are
> writing platform-specific code, C allows you to do a whole lot of things
> you can't do with other languages.

I'd phrase that as "the compiler will generate code for programs without 
defined semantics that's often what you want."

>   Most DOS demos written in C used raw pointers (eg. to the VGA memory
> buffer). They worked just fine on that platform.

Maybe I'm more of a theoreticist, but "it works for me" isn't how I like to 
write kernels. ;-)

>   It means that many if not most of the "high-level" languages pay zero
> attention to memory usage.

I'm not saying every programming language is appropriate for writing 
kernels. I'm saying there are good high-level languages both more powerful 
and safer that are better than C, and I'm not sure why they're not more popular.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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scott wrote:
>> That's what it sounds like, the Pov-Ray world anyway. You've greatly 
>> increased my paranoia.
>> Any day now I expect the carpenter's union to redesign and rebuild my 
>> house not for
>> convenience or comfort but to teach me the current accepted practice 
>> in carpentry.
> 
> Even if POV4 does change to an OOP model that you don't like, a) that is 
> not going to be released for decades, and b) you are free to still use 
> the latest stable 3.x release.  I wouldn't worry about it.
> 
> 
If that be the case, shall we postpone this discussion for
twenty years or so? :-) Did that produce a wink.

David

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> >   Of course in C. And "undefined behavior" can also mean "works as desired
> > in this platform".

> That's what I'm distinguishing. That's why I say C, as such, isn't very good 
> for that sort of thing. You can do it, but only because you look at what 
> your particular compiler generated for some piece of otherwise undefined 
> code, and say "yes, that's what I'd like."

  There aren't many programming languages out there which would allow the
same kind of "controlled compiler abuse" as C, which is precisely why it's
so popular to write kernels and device drivers.

  Of course not all kernels in existence have been written in C (or asm),
but right now I can't say what other languages have been used to write
kernels.

> >   Most DOS demos written in C used raw pointers (eg. to the VGA memory
> > buffer). They worked just fine on that platform.

> Maybe I'm more of a theoreticist, but "it works for me" isn't how I like to 
> write kernels. ;-)

  Sometimes you just have to. No programming language can account for every
single feature a kernel needs. Sometimes you just *must* bypass the standard
language and poke the hardware directly.

  The only other alternative would be to write the kernel in assembly, which
would be enormously less portable and less manageable than C.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Neeum Zawan wrote:

>     Try lying in front of the house when the bulldozers come. And if you 
> see someone coming along hugging a towel, become friends with him. 
> Otherwise your life will be in danger.
> 
>     And not because of the bulldozers.
> 
I'm not at all clear what this means. Submit to the destructors (or to 
your fate)?
Do you mean OOP is a bulldozing machine predestined to level all. That 
I'm an
obstructor of the progress man and should be removed? That my life is
in danger from irate OOP programmers? What did you mean?

David

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David H. Burns <dhb### [at] cherokeetelnet> wrote:
> Neeum Zawan wrote:

> >     Try lying in front of the house when the bulldozers come. And if you 
> > see someone coming along hugging a towel, become friends with him. 
> > Otherwise your life will be in danger.
> > 
> >     And not because of the bulldozers.
> > 
> I'm not at all clear what this means. Submit to the destructors (or to 
> your fate)?
> Do you mean OOP is a bulldozing machine predestined to level all. That 
> I'm an
> obstructor of the progress man and should be removed? That my life is
> in danger from irate OOP programmers? What did you mean?

  Can I ask you how old are you?

  You don't understand the concept of smileys, you don't understand the
concept of object-oriented programming, and you can't even get a hitchhiker's
reference.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
>   You said "That's an IDE issue, not a language issue." I read that to mean
> that a language (like C# in this case) doesn't need to be designed to be
> readable because an IDE can be used to make it readable.

No, that was specifically in response to "I like header files because it 
gives me a nice summary of the functionality of the code." I'd rather have 
the specification of the code there once, and to have tools to generate 
documentation from the code, rather than to have the compiler require me to 
write the same specification twice just so it knows there's documentation.

I dunno - on big projects, I usually wind up writing a program that reads my 
.C files and generates the .H files automatically anyway. But then, I'm the 
kind of programmer who documents code before writing it, which is apparently 
terribly rare.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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