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From: stirling@fortune.UUCP (Patrick Stirling)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c++
Subject: Re: C++ vs. Objective-C
Message-ID: <5896@fortune.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 31-Mar-86 14:12:02 EST
Article-I.D.: fortune.5896
Posted: Mon Mar 31 14:12:02 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 2-Apr-86 03:26:17 EST
References: <780@well.UUCP> <700@tymix.UUCP>
Reply-To: stirling@fortune.UUCP
Organization: Fortune Systems, Belmont, CA
Lines: 25
Summary: ref for Objective-C

>Herb Kanner:
>What is "Objective-C"?  Pointer to book, reference manual, or article,

I thought this would be of general interest to this newsgroup:

Objective-C is a superset of regular C (Kernighan & Ritchie), developed
by Productivity Products International (PPI), 27 Glen Road, Sandy Hook,
CT 06482. Tel (203) 426-1875. They have a C preprocessor that converts 
a program written in Obj-C into ordinary C which you then compile. Here
at Fortune Systems we are writing a Spreadsheet application in Obj-C.
My overall top-of-my-head comments are that Obj-C speeds the initial
development process, mainly by virtue of its modularity and inheritance
features. Classes that are sub-classes of other classes automatically
inherit all of the instance variables and methods (=private functions)
of their superclasses. This helps in tracking down bugs, as it is fairly
easy to trace the exact code that is being executed for any function. Does
C++ do this? The disadvantages that I have found so far are the compile
time (very slow) and the run time (somewhat slower that plain C, because
of the messaging overhead, I think 1 message = approx. 2 function calls).
This is really only a problem where time is of the essence, e.g. screen I/O,
long object searches/comparisons). Feel free to contact me - I don't know
my e-mail path from the net; my phone number is (415) 598-4441. Fortune
Systems Corp, 300 harbor Blvd, Belmont, CA.

patrick