Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> As I said, lots of kernels are written in FORTH (for small machines) or Ada 
>> (for dangerous machines).
> 
>   I wonder why Ada never got much popularity, even though it was really
> pushed at some point (especially by the US government, AFAIK). Was it
> lack of compilers for common hardware or something?

Expense, I think. The GNU Ada compiler is currently the most featureful out 
there. But to call yourself Ada (at least for the first decade or so) you 
had to pay a fairly large sum to pass certification tests. You couldn't put 
something out there you'd thrown together, followed most but not all of the 
standard, and had compiler bugs you'd fix in the next release, and still 
market an Ada compiler.

Since things like compilers *are* things for which FOSS works great, that 
kind of put a big dent in Ada's adoption, I think. That and the FUD, of course.

-- 
   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:
>> Now, I ask again
>> tell me what Object Oriented Programming means.
> 
>   I have already written extensively about it in several posts in this
> thread.
> 

Sorry, I'm no wiser for reading them; But don't sweat it. :)

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On Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:51:47 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Expense, I think.

And performance, at least with the early compilers.  We had an IBM 
mainframe at my university that one student compiling Ada on would bring 
to its knees for hours.

Jim

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On 23-7-2009 2:58, David H. Burns wrote:
> andrel wrote:
>> On 22-7-2009 1:26, David H. Burns wrote:
>>> andrel wrote:
>>>
>>>> That you see your smiley does not mean everybody else will.
>>>
>>> Thanks. Did you see it? I did when I read my own post. I don't think 
>>> it shows up in the text in
>>> my "sent" file. These matters get complicated.
>>> :) (smiley ?)
>>>
>>
>> I do. In your post, not when replying :) , neither yours nor mine.
>> The point I tried to make earlier is that it depends on the mail 
>> reader of the person *reading*. You don't have an influence on it. You 
>> type a colon followed by a bracket, that is what you sent and what is 
>> supported by NNTP. After that somebody is trying to cleverly replace 
>> them by rotated smileys, which is OK as long as they get it right :/
>> IIRC they have problems with exotic ones like \o/ perhaps because they 
>> can conceivably be in a real post or in /ASCII art/.
>>
>> In short, there is a big chance that what you will see is not what I 
>> wrote. Perhaps it is what I intended.
> 
> Thanks, again, Andrel. The smileys work, :/ and \o/ came through as the 
> Ascii characters.

:/ might have been a smiley too, but isn't in TB. I remember having 
problems to understand the \o/ when I first met him, and am not 
surprised that TB doesn't replace it. I was expecting italics for /ASCII 
art/ but apparently that should have been /ASCII/ /art/. which is 
strange because *bold face* and _under line_ do range over the space.

> I'm using Thunderbird.

me too.

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On 07/23/09 11:15, David H. Burns wrote:
>> I'm sure you think in OOP all the time with POV-Ray. You create a
>> sphere. It's an object with certain properties (texture, location,
>> etc). Now let's say you want to rotate the sphere, does it hurt so
>> much to do something like:
>>
>> mysphere.rotate(45)
>>
>
> No! I think in terms of objects, not of OOP. The concept of an "object"
> as used
> in Pov-Ray in a valuable tool for thinking and programming -and used
> well there.
> What I have seen of OOP programming is something else. :)
>
> David
>

	OK. I have no idea what you're saying.

	What is the "No" referring to? Are you saying "no, it doesn't hurt"? 
Are you saying "No, I hate that way of doing it"? Are you sweeping your 
hand across my whole message and saying "No! I can't stand it!"?



-- 
Thesaurus: prehistoric reptile with a great vocabulary.

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On 07/23/09 13:12, David H. Burns 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. 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

	OK. Now I'm _really_ confused!

	Was your initial concern that POV-Ray - the *software* - will be coded 
using OOP?

	Or was it that the language that *users* of POV-Ray will have to use to 
describe their scenes will be OO?

	If the former, then your fears are way, way, off, and I suspect along 
with the others, that you don't know what OOP is.

	Yes, POV-Ray 3.7, the *software* will be written in C++, and will very 
likely use OO principles. However, I believe that the actual scripts 
that you as a *user* will write, will stay almost the same.

	*That* should be of really no bother to you. You may not know this, but 
a _huge_ amount of the software that you use was actually written using 
OO principles, in an OO language. Almost all large projects that were 
coded in C++ use OOP (and again, I'm sure you use *many* programs coded 
in C++). Everything written in Java uses OOP. Lots of stuff written in 
Python use OOP.

	Now if your concern is the latter (that you as a *user* will have to 
describe your scene using OOP), then your concerns are not entirely 
unfounded, but they won't be relevant for a while. 3.7 will allow you to 
code as you have mostly done.

	Version 4.0, though, will quite possibly have a different scene 
description language and the syntax you will use to describe your scene 
will be quite different. It's very likely that this will be OO, but as 
I've said a bunch of times, if they make a good SDL, it'll be 
straightforward. It could even be done in a way that a new user will not 
have to know what OO is, and only intermediate or advanced users will 
deal with the details of OOP.


-- 
Thesaurus: prehistoric reptile with a great vocabulary.

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Darren New wrote:
> 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.

Point taken.  I got in the bad habit of using my headers as my 
documentation, and coding my implementations to match them, rather than 
keeping the documentation separate :)

Of course, being Visual Studio, the Class explorer offers similar 
functionality, but it's not in the same form I'm used to from looking at 
header files.  Ah, well, I'll adjust eventually.

> 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.

Yes, it is rare.  But good, so keep it up :)

-- 
Chambers

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Chambers wrote:
> Point taken.  I got in the bad habit of using my headers as my 
> documentation, and coding my implementations to match them, rather than 
> keeping the documentation separate :)

That's a perfectly reasonable way to do it in a language that requires 
headers to start with.  A language with javadoc-like features? Nah.

The cool thing about Eiffel is you can not only produce a document that's 
the equivalent of a .H or javadoc (doxygen, etc) file, but also a "flat" 
version that includes all the documentation from the parent classes that you 
didn't override. So if you want the docs for "hashtable implemented using 
arrays of streams" documentation, you don't need to grope through three or 
more superclasses just to understand what that one class does.

> Of course, being Visual Studio, the Class explorer offers similar 
> functionality, but it's not in the same form I'm used to from looking at 
> header files.  Ah, well, I'll adjust eventually.

Yep. And Smalltalk is even more different, since you can open browsers on 
things like "all classes that implement a method called X". Smalltalk being 
one of those "duck-typing" languages.

Speaking of which, what is "duck typing" that isn't just "dynamic typing"?
WTF does that even mean?

> Yes, it is rare.  But good, so keep it up :)

I remember once way back, having written docs for the library, I was sitting 
there coding it up. (The project was a rewrite from BASIC to C, so I had a 
real good idea what the library needed to do.) I had a stack of 
documentation, and I was implementing each function.  The "best" programmer 
in the company comes up and asks what I'm doing, and I tell him. He points 
to the inch-thick print-out, asks what it is, and I tell him it's the docs. 
He says, sounding baffled, "How can you write the docs before the program?" 
I ask him "How can you know when you're done programming without writing the 
docs first?"

Ah, fun times. The first time I ever completely stopped taking a job seriously.

-- 
   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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clipka wrote:
> Chambers <Ben### [at] gmailcom_no_underscores> wrote:
>>> the buck does *not* stop here.
>> Shouldn't that be "the Buck"? ;)
> 
> ??
> 
> 

As in, David K Buck :)

-- 
Chambers

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David H. Burns wrote:
> What I have seen of OOP programming is something else.

Just out of curiosity (but you keep saying things like this, so I have 
to ask), where have you seen OOP programming?

-- 
Chambers

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