[plug] OO

[The Thought Assassin]

On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Oliver White wrote:
> The Thought Assassin wrote:
> > You seem to imply that object-orientation and procedurality are mutually
> > exclusive. (but I know you are aware that this is not the case) Smalltalk
> > is an object-oriented procedural language, just like Java or C++.
> From what I've been taught, Smalltalk is *pure* OO, without any
> procedural bits whatsoever.
It is pure OO because it doesn't have any non-objects, not because it has
no procedural aspects.

> > > Popular OO languages mix object orientation with other paradigms,
> > > certainly. The other paradigm may be functional, logical or procedural.
> > Yep. But how many logical or functional programs (OO or otherwise) do you
> > know that deal mainly with temporal/event-driven/interactive IO?
> My friend wrote 'Hangman' in Mercury. ;-)
> Seriously, there was talk about writing our MMORPG server in a logic/OO
> language. It was a popular choice, and perhaps the best choice but for
> the fact that only a couple of programmers on the team knew it.
These are synchronous, not event-driven.
Input comes in.
Processing happens.
Output is generated.
Repeat.
AFAICT: At each stage the program knows what is coming next, and only one
action is taking place at a given time. Is that right? This makes these
applications prime candidates for a functional or logical/functional 
approach, but also constitutes a difference between them and the most
visible kind of program.

> > > Point and click programming has characterised the OO paradigm for a
> > > while now, and as such involves a lot of events and responses to events.
> > It certainly has, but it has been OO procedural programming all the way.
> Again... take a look at smalltalk and give examples of how it has procedural
> features. I'm happy to be wrong. :-)
It has an assignment operator. Case closed. :)

-Greg