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From: sakkinen@tukki.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: What is OOP?
Message-ID: <1524@tukki.jyu.fi>
Date: 17 Oct 89 07:19:38 GMT
References: <1208@skye.ed.ac.uk> <5065@omepd.UUCP>
Reply-To: sakkinen@jytko.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen)
          SAKKINEN@FINJYU.bitnet (alternative)
Organization: University of Jyvaskyla, Finland
Lines: 32

In article <5065@omepd.UUCP> merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz) writes:
>[...]
>"Ada is PL/1 trying to be Smalltalk"
>
>(no flames back please... either like it, or don't! :-)

No flame, just some education:
Ada's basic design and philosophy is clearly different from the
"featurism" of PL/1 (while even PL/1 was in many ways an admirable
effort for its time).
Ada tries least of all to be Smalltalk: it is just as unfit for
very dynamic "exploratory programming" as Smalltalk is unfit for
programming embedded real-time systems for space flight.

A little aside: do we object-orienters tend to be some kind
of Stalinists, always looking out for "class enemies" like Ada
and COBOL to liquidate? Have our own languages and systems not
enough merit, so we must scorn others? (I think Ed Berard wrote
about this in his recent report on OOPSLA'89.)

>Just another SmallTalker, stuck in this UNIX-compatible world...
>[...]

Dispair not, you can already have Smalltalk on many of those
UNIX-compatibles.

Markku Sakkinen
Department of Computer Science
University of Jyvaskyla (a's with umlauts)
Seminaarinkatu 15
SF-40100 Jyvaskyla (umlauts again)
Finland