Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!claris!hearn
From: hearn@claris.com (Bob Hearn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: LSC++?
Message-ID: <9166@claris.com>
Date: 23 Mar 89 19:19:05 GMT
References: <1791@viscous.sco.COM> <1330@husc6.harvard.edu> <7235@fluke.COM> <1405@sw1e.UUCP>
Reply-To: hearn@claris.com (Bob Hearn)
Organization: Claris Corporation, Mountain View CA
Lines: 22

In article <1405@sw1e.UUCP> uucibg@sw1e.UUCP (Brian Gilstrap [5-3929]) writes:
>I'll be happy to *discuss* the differences between C++ and these languages
>(and would in fact enjoy the opportunity), but please: no flames.

Hey, Brian, how's it going?  I don't know much about Objective-C, but I've
heard it's a dog, efficiency-wise, compared to C.  That it takes all the
SmallTalk ideas and forces them rather rudely into a C-like syntax.  Is this
true?  One thing I love about C++ is that it doesn't have to be (and in
fact in general isn't) any less efficient than C.  The object-oriented
stuff is there, if you want it.  You can even have classes and object
without any real (slow) message passing or dynamic type-checking, but then
virtual functions give you polymorphism if you need it, at a computational
cost no greater than if you did it the hard way with explicit table lookup.
As for operator overloading... I love it.  But it sure is easy to abuse.
What do these other languages give you that C++ doesn't?  And since C++ is
likely to become the new standard, once it gets well-enough defined, does
it matter?  BTW... I've heard rumors of a second-edition Stroustrup.  My
working references right now are Stroustrup and the papers he's written
since the book.  Is this up to date?

Bob Hearn
hearn@claris.com