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From: ns@cat.cmu.edu (Nicholas Spies)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth,comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Re: Dynamic Bindings (was Re: Forth Preprocessor)
Message-ID: <3180@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 1 Oct 88 18:08:49 GMT
References: <13613@mimsy.UUCP> <3492@phri.UUCP> <23378@wlbr.EATON.COM> <1642@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <498@umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU> <1678@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
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In article <1678@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> orr%cs.glasgow.ac.uk@nss.ucl.ac.uk (Fraser Orr) writes:
>I think that it has yet to be establised that object oriented languages
>are the best thing.  I like object oriented features and use them
>frequently, but I can't see why people have taken it to the extremes
>that has happened in Smalltalk.  OO programming is a good idea, but use
>it where it is appropriate.  Modeling integers as objects that accept
>messages etc is inappropriate.  This should be modeled in the way in
>which it is used, that is, as a mathematical object.

It seems that you would prefer to have a hodge-podge rather than a consistant
application of the object-oriented paradigm? Sending messges to integers makes
a lot of sense because coersion (short, long, float) is handled in the same
matter as the rest of the Smalltalk system. Anyway, real implementations of
Smalltalk don't necessarily follow the Smalltalk virtual machine to the letter,
in that messages are not instantiated as objects unless errors are encountered
and some byte code instructions may in fact be compiled to machine code.

Forth is also a "neat" language because it too has a consistant paradigm, using
pointers to fold the system up so that it consumes minimal resources. Surely,
there is a great value to being able to define your own HL application 
languages, even if the medium is what you contempuously refer to as a MLL. 
There is also a great deal to be said about being able to deal with the innards
of the language (both in Smalltalk and Forth) rather than programming with a
black box from one or another mega-corporation. (Smalltalk may be the product
of a mega-corporation, but it is not a black box).

Forth is not the "toy" language you make it out to me: a couple of years ago
Beth Rather of Forth Inc gave a paper at the Rochester Forth Conference about
their development of an integrated computer system for an airport that
networked several Vax's, several 100 8086 boards and many thousands of
sensors -- with all of the software written in Forth. They got the contract
because the previous vendor (who had bought the hardware) couldn't deliver.
As I recall, they had a team of 15 programmers...

C++ may be great for C programmers who are suddenly discovering the light about
OO programming--and have bought into AT&T's vision of the world, but I thought
that Objective C was supposed to be even better. I guess when the NeXt machine
is revealed to the world we'll hear more about that...
-- 
Nicholas Spies			ns@cat.cmu.edu.arpa
Center for Design of Educational Computing
Carnegie Mellon University