[CrackMonkey] How about that John McCain?

[Deirdre Saoirse]

On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Monkey Master wrote:

> begin  Deirdre Schmeirdre quotation:
> > > Templates are what made me realize that C++ was a very poor
> > > implementation of object-orientation.
> > 
> > Not really -- templates are only necessary because C and C++ are
> > early rather than late bound. Objective-C, for example, which is
> > late-bound, doesn't use templates.
> 
> Right, exactly.  I kept looking for how languages like
> smalltalk and CLOS did templates, and couldn't find it.  I was
> eventually told exactly what kind of low-down dirty hack they are by
> an old Modula hacker on Usenet.  I used to have his rant in my home
> directory on eskimo.  I wonder if any of that is still there.

The difference is of course speed. The way C++ does it, while crufty, is
fast. The way smalltalk does it, while elegant, is slow. Objective-C and
Python come somewhere between the two. The problem with Objective-C is
that it creates HUGE tables in memory that make running large programs
excessively resource hungry. But the code is VERY short by comparison with
C++.

IOW, it's all tradeoffs. C++'s was deliberate and imho defensible.

-- 
_Deirdre   *   http://www.linuxcabal.net   *   http://www.deirdre.net
"Mars has been a tough target" -- Peter G. Neumann, Risks Digest Moderator
"That's because the Martians keep shooting things down." -- Harlan Rosenthal
<Harlan.Rosenthal at Dialogic.com>, retorting in Risks Digest 20.60