What are OOP's Jargons and Complexities?
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From: Matthias Buelow on 5 Jun 2005 10:30 Andrea Griffini wrote: >>Of course it is a language, just not a standardized one (if you include >>Borland's extensions that make it practical). > > The history of "runtime error 200" and its handling from > borland is a clear example of what I mean with a product. Hmm, I had to google this up... Quite embarrassing, but it's a runtime bug and got nothing to do with the language per se. And it certainly manifests itself after the hey-days of Turbo Pascal (when Borland seems to have lost interest in maintaining it.) mkb.
From: Andrea Griffini on 5 Jun 2005 19:34 On Sun, 05 Jun 2005 16:30:18 +0200, Matthias Buelow <mkb(a)incubus.de> wrote: >Quite embarrassing, but it's a runtime bug and got nothing to do with >the language per se. And it certainly manifests itself after the >hey-days of Turbo Pascal (when Borland seems to have lost interest in >maintaining it.) The point is not the bug, of course, but how borland handled it. It appeared when the user community of borland pascal was well alive and kicking, but borland didn't even invest 5 seconds for the issue. The users had to fix the library themselves (possible because at that time with Borland Pascal you were getting the whole source code of the library; but note that it was a 100% genuine bug due to misprogramming, fixing it even on a dead product would have been the a nice move from borland). The user community went even further, as so many executables were written witn borland pascal that a special tool for binary patching executables was built (actually a few of them, as being unofficial it wasn't that simple to get to know that such a tool existed, so different people independently resorted to the same solution). Andrea
From: Xah Lee on 7 Jun 2005 14:03
The Rise of Class Hierarchy Because of psychological push for purity, in Java there are no longer plain subroutines. Everything is a method of some class. Standard functions like opening a file, square root a number, for loop thru a list, if else branching statements, or simple arithmetic operations... must now somehow become a method of some class. In this way, coupled with the all-important need to manage data with inheritance, the OOP Class Hierarchy is born. Basic data types such as now the various classes of numbers, are now grouped into a Number class hierarchy, each class having their own set of methods. The characters, string or other data types, are lumped into one hierarchy class of data types. Many types of lists (variously known as arrays, vectors, lists, hashes...), are lumped into a one hierarchy, with each Classe node having its own set methods as appropriate. Math functions, are lumped into some math class hierarchy. Now suppose the plus operation +, where does it go? Should it become methods of the various classes under Number headings, or should it be methods of the Math class set? Each language deals with these issues differently. As a example, see this page for the hierarchy of Java's core language classes: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/lang/package-tree.html (local copy) OOP being inherently complex exacerbated by marketing propaganda, and the inheritance and hierarchy concept is so entangled in OOP, sometimes OOP is erroneously thought of as languages with a hierarchy. (there are now also so-called Object-Oriented databases that ride the fad of “all data are trees†...) Normally in a program, when we want to do some operation we just call the subroutine on some data. Such as open(this_file) square(4) But now with the pure OOP style, there can no longer be just a number or this_file path, because everything now must be a Object. So, the "this_file", usually being just a string representing the path to a file on the disk, is now some "file object". Initiated by something like this_file = new File("path to file"); where this file class has a bunch of methods such as reading or writing to it. see this page for the complexity of the IO tree http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/io/package-tree.html (local copy) see this page for the documentation of the File class itself, along with its 40 or so methods and other things. http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/io/File.html (local copy) ------- to be continued... This is part of an installment of the article “What are OOP's Jargons and Complexities†by Xah Lee, 20050128. The full text is at http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/t2/oop.html © Copyright 2005 by Xah Lee. Verbatim duplication of the complete article for non-profit purposes is granted. The article is published in the following newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.lisp,comp.unix.programmer comp.lang.python,comp.lang.perl.misc,comp.lang.scheme,comp.lang.java.programmer comp.lang.functional,comp.object,comp.software-eng,comp.software.patterns Xah xah(a)xahlee.org ∑ http://xahlee.org/ |