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From: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: what is c++, c, ansi c etc...
Message-ID: <15342@bfmny0.UU.NET>
Date: 9 Apr 90 03:27:07 GMT
References: <6000:Apr720:31:1490@stealth.acf.nyu.edu> <14311@lambda.UUCP>
Reply-To: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff)
Distribution: usa
Lines: 25

>>> Also what is object oriented programming?

>> The latest name that young urban computer science types have applied to
>> the old idea of adding another level of indirection to function calls.

>Bravo!  But, I doubt you will hear many more positive responses to that
>statement.

Few ideas are totally new.  Most have precursors.

Useful new disciplines can involve combining not-so-new ideas in new
ways.  OOP combines information hiding and functional indirection to
create something fairly powerful.

I can sympathize with grumbling veterans who see recognizable ideas at
the center of OOP and feel like dismissing the result as Not That Big A
Deal.  (If I had been around at the time, I probably could have mustered
similar sympathy for old line machine language hackers sneering at
those new "high level" languages.)  But you can't turn back the clock.

If programming were perfect it wouldn't need any new approaches.  I am
not too impressed with our current state of perfection, are you?
-- 
To have a horror of the bourgeois   (\(    Tom Neff
is bourgeois. -- Jules Renard        )\)   tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET