Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!efi!tim
From: tim@efi.com (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Multiple Inheritance -- Is It A Luxury?
Message-ID: <1990Jul13.185033.1383@efi.com>
Date: 13 Jul 90 18:50:33 GMT
References: <15132@reed.UUCP> <268BA8DC.4CD4@intercon.com> <8937@goofy.Apple.COM> <268C032E.5137@intercon.com> <1990Jul2.181147.1672@efi.com> <8967@goofy.Apple.COM> <1990Jul5.223032.14604@efi.com> <2742.26985429@cc.helsinki.fi>
Organization: Electronics For Imaging, Inc.
Lines: 37

In article <1990Jul5.223032.14604@efi.com>, tim@efi.com (Tim Maroney) writes:
>> Object programming is another step towards more human conceptualization
>> of tasks.  The whole notion of class inheritance is based on the human
>> division of phenomena into categories and subcategories.  Because of

In article <2742.26985429@cc.helsinki.fi> mnykanen@cc.helsinki.fi writes:
>Are you saying that hierarchicality is a fundamental property of human
>thought?

Yes.  Description inherently operates at various levels of
abstraction.  There are animals; there are dogs; there is my dog.
If you know of languages or cultures which do not operate in this
hierarchical fashion, I would like to hear about them (always
interested in new ways of thinking!)

>I think we western 'scientists' have just been educated in the
>Aristotelian tradition (although A. himself would have stuck with single
>inheritance.. :-) ).

I can't claim to be a cultural anthropologist, but levels of
abstraction in decription certainly precede Aristotle, and appear in
cultures which were not influenced by Aristotle.  Look at, say, the
Trobriand Islanders' mythology.  They have concepts both for particular
animals, and for animals overall, and for types of animals; for people,
for people of different genders, and for individual people; for
spirits in general, for families of spirits, and for particular spirits.

If you were doing a simulation of these concepts in an object language,
you would represent them with superclass and subclass relationships.

>This is what you get when making philo/psychological
>commitments based on programming practise; conceptually OOP is a mess.

Conceptually, our minds are a mess.  Look at the syntax of natural
language if you want to see a real mess.  The question with a
programming language is how close its mess approximates to our
ordinary mess....