Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!wang!wdr
From: wdr@wang.com (William Ricker)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: Objective C vs. C++, Recommendations?
Message-ID: <1990Mar6.144317.9223@wang.com>
Date: 6 Mar 90 14:43:17 GMT
References: <1535@dinl.mmc.UUCP> <44039@ames.arc.nasa.gov>
Organization: Wang Labs, Lowell MA, USA
Lines: 65

jsweet@slsaux.arc.nasa.gov (John Sweet) writes:
[technical reasons omitted]
>Why choose Objective-C?
>   -  StepStone is an excellent company.
>   -  Next has chosen Objective-C.
>   -  IBM (I believe) has just announced a
>        new Unix platform which comes standard
>        with Objective-C.
  called RSX-6000, a RISC platform, with amazing claimed MIPS. 
  Supposedly bought the NextStep package of Objective-C and NeXT's
  windowing system, a nice combination.  Do see the interface-builder
  demo on NextStep.  Draw your windows & menus & boxes, connect them to 
  (new) object-classes, and fill-in bodies for (automagically created)
  methods matching the menu & window ops.  

Add:
  -   Oracle said in their presentation at CASE: The Next Generation 
        (a commercial "symposium") that their CASE*<mumble> offereings
        are implemented in "C and Objective-C".

>   These reasons are political, and, in my opinion, 
>balance the explicit (or implicit) 
>endorsements by AT&T, Apple, and GNU.

This list may be getting to critical mass, where companies may now consider
Objective-C a politically (=business decision) safe alternative.


>   - Objective-C is an abstract superset of 
>C++, (By this I mean that everything you can 
>do in C++, i.e. static binding without the 
>message dispatcher, except for inline functions 

Comment: Do not judge Objective-C by only Cox's book; the book documents
the pre-NeXT version of the language.  Not only does Objective-C 4.0 have
the static-binding option mentioned above, but it also fixes the name-space
problem which is obvious to casual readers of the Cox book who consider 
building large systems.

>   - Self-referential applications are more > powererful.
As are languages with some support for persistent objects, which Objective-C
does have, in part because it doesn't throw-away its symbol table.

>   - Professionally maintained, supported, >and documented Class library. 
Hear, hear!  Between Stepstone's Software-ICs and the NextStep interface
builder and display-postscript interface, you get a wonderful package.

>  C++ programmers wake up!!! 
>  By throwing away you symbol table at compile time
>you are making your life more difficult than it
>need be.
>  Try Objective-C.

Amen.

My biases: I was very happy as an Objective-C 4.0 Beta site, and wish I had a 
development plan to use it for.  (I don't recommend using Beta anything,
but I recommend Objective-C 4.0.) Unfortunately for me, the RSX-6000 and 
NeXT aren't immediately seen as strategic platforms for our software, so I've
only gotten demos of NextStep/InterfaceBuildinger or whatever they call it.
But I know enough PostScript & ObjectiveC to know the demo I saw wasn't smoke
and mirrors but a real program.

Bill Ricker
wdr @ wang.com