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From: john@mingus.mitre.org (John D. Burger)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Internationalization [was Re: Printing plural
Message-ID: <1991Mar5.225011.23386@linus.mitre.org>
Date: 5 Mar 91 22:50:11 GMT
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gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
> What does this have to do with having a "real object system"?  You
> can write different printing routines for different data types in
> almost any language.

I wrote:
> Maybe I don't understand you, but how do you do this in C?

He replied:
> Simple.  Every time you define a data type, also write a procedure
> to print it -- just like you would do in a so-called object oriented
> language.
> Of course this doesn't give you runtime typing.  But runtime typing
> (or runtime polymorphism) is orthogonal to object orientation.

That's true, but you're just describing a particular example of
procedural abstraction, which we all do already.  I still have to know
whether to call PRINT-DOLLAR-AMOUNT or PRINT-FRANC-AMOUNT.
--
John Burger                                               john@mitre.org

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