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From: eeh@public.BTR.COM (Eduardo E. Horvath  eeh@btr.com)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Objective C is a Kludge ( was Re: An Intuition.device? )
Message-ID: <389@public.BTR.COM>
Date: 13 Sep 90 21:27:37 GMT
References: <1032@ucsvc.ucs.unimelb.edu.au> <90255.124203UH2@psuvm.psu.edu> <385@public.BTR.COM> <30261@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Organization: BTR Public Access UNIX, MtnView CA, Contact: cs@btr.com 415-966-1429
Lines: 36

In article <385@public.BTR.COM> I wrote:

>>Finally, Objective C only has dynamic typing (slow).

In article <30261@nigel.ee.udel.edu> new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New) writes:

>Not true.  My understanding is that Obj-C is a strict superset of plain
>old C, and hence has plenty of static typing.

	In the C part maybe, but whenever an object is involved, the 
dynamic typing comes into effect.  Objective-C consists of two separate
mutually distinct languages, shall we say.  The C stuff does all of the 
grunt work, while an objective part handles message passing.  The C stuff
is plain C, no overloading, etc. like C++.  The objective part looks a little
like Smalltalk or BOOPSI.  Both are distinct. Sending the (obviously) wrong
message to an object results in a run-time error.  Sure you can write
a program that doesn't have dynamic typing, but then you aren't using
the objective part of Objective-C.

>The dynamic function calls should not be particularly slow either,
>judging by what I know of their implementation. Certainly not much
>slower than C++'s virtual functions, if indeed slower at all.


	Agreed, but Objecctive-C doesn't use function calls to invoke
methods.  It sends messages.  

	I'm not saying that I don't want to see a package that produces
Objective-C style intuition code, what I'm saying is that I don't really
want to see that become the *standard* Amiga development environment.

=========================================================================
Eduardo Horvath				eeh@btr.com
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	"Trust me, I know what I'm doing." - Sledge Hammer
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