Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!igor!rutabaga!jls From: jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM (Jim Showalter) Newsgroups: comp.object Subject: Re: Inheritance is a tool (was Re: Readability of Ada) Message-ID: Date: 30 Apr 91 04:14:53 GMT References: <1991Apr25.170356.21237@odin.diku.dk> <294@dumbcat.sf.ca.us> Sender: news@Rational.COM Lines: 46 >Jim, as long as all of us are stacking decks to make our viewpoint come out >best I stand fairly accused, but then so does Bjarne Stroustrup. I started out arguing that Ada was inherently more readable than C. He countered that C++ more naturally expresses inheritance than Ada. I countered that at least one common form of inheritance is poorly-enough supported in C++ that the Ada solution is just as good. Which deck is stacked sort of depends on who's ox is gored, yes? ;-) >Holding meaningless people to meaningless claims is a waste of time. >Better is to educate others on how meaningless the claims are so they wont >waste their time either. Precisely what I'm trying to do. I see this Next Great Wave of momentum toward the wholesale adoption of OO-everything, without, in many cases, any decent discussion of what any of it means and what, if anything, it actually adds. I somehow doubt that it is the advent of, say, polymorphism that will make us all rich and famous and yet, to hear the OO evangelists talk, that's all we need. What we REALLY need are decent software architects, industrial-strength tools, and workable process models. Whether or not a language supports virtual functions is so trivial in comparison it boggles my mind when I hear the claims. >Now you tell me how you would solve the original problem in a >language that doesn't support inheritance. Subject changes not allowed. Same as it was always done in the past: variant record indexed by enumeration type, case statement on the type. > > -- > > * "Beyond 100,000 lines of code, you should probably be coding in Ada." * > > * - P.G. Plauger, Convener and Secretary of the ANSI C Committee * >I think he's off by an order of magnitude. 100 Kloc is easily (and >successfully) done in C these days. 2MSLOC is easily and successfully done in Ada these days. Know any C projects of similar complexity and scope that aren't total clusterfucks? (I know of several that are so screwed up they introduce, a la Brooks, greater than one bug for every bug they "fix".) -- * "Beyond 100,000 lines of code, you should probably be coding in Ada." * * - P.J. Plauger, Convener and Secretary of the ANSI C Committee * * * * The opinions expressed herein are my own. *