[plug] [why not staroffice]

[The Thought Assassin]

On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Mike Holland wrote:
> On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, tlee wrote:
> > Are procedural programs still being writen or is everybody using C++
> > OOP these days on linux.? Any feedback very appreciated.
> C++ is still very procedural.
Almost all OOP languages in mainstream use are procedural. It is usually
up to the programmer to code in an object-oriented fashion to avoid the
negatives of procedural programming.

> Very little non-trivial programming isnt.
I would dispute that, but I feel I am probably just disputing your meaning
of "non-trivial". Any program which must do extensive interactive
(interacting with it's environment, not necessarily a person) IO must be
procedural to a certain extent, since it must respond to temporal events.
The nature of our processors also lends itself to procedural programming
as this is the closest approximation to the way our programs will execute
on the machine. OTOH, object-oriented design of these procedural programs
can greatly simplify the coupling of their components, and go a long way
towards enhancing correctness and maintainability.

A lot of scientific and calculating programs are significantly
non-procedural. They are certainly non-trivial, but they are not highly
visible. These are the hardest problems, though, so they are a lot more
visible to the computer scientist, hence the great theoretical interest in
non-procedural programming paradigms.

-Greg Mildenhall