Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel-eecis!gatech!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!cs.tu-berlin.de!news.uni-hamburg.de!news.Hanse.DE!wavehh.hanse.de!cracauer
From: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de (Martin Cracauer)
Subject: Re: CMU/CL in Rhapsody
Message-ID: <1997Mar6.103001.6913@wavehh.hanse.de>
Reply-To: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de
Organization: '(a (cons tructive organization))
References: <vrotneyE6LDAC.E1C@netcom.com> <ydraht8r7r.fsf@CLYDE.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU>
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 97 10:30:01 GMT
Lines: 41

Scott Fahlman <sef@clyde.boltz.cs.cmu.edu> writes:

[...]

>However, interfacing CMU CL to a user interface written in Objective C
>might be bloody.  You could either cobble an interface together by
>hand or try to build an automatic wrapper-generator.  The latter would
>be cooler, but harder.

I'd like to point out that Objective-C is a very brave cicitzen when
it comes to integrate it into other languages (compared to C++ and
such). Using an ObjC based GUI framework from languages that interface
to C might be very straightforward.

Most features of Objective-C are implemented as a normal C
library. This is radically different from C++ where you need a lot of
compiler support. ObjC's compiler support is just some syntactic
sugar, text-replacing stuff only.

ObjC's syntactic extensions can easily be left unused and you
can call the ObjC runtime functions from pure C code. Other things
like object creation, object copying and conversion are either
expressable as C function calls also or have been ignored by the ObjC
designers anyway :-)

And ObjC is quite reflective, the runtime tells you a lot about the
objects, classes and messages you can use.

[...]

>Personally, I think that Apple/Next will probably be out of business
>before you could finish this task.

There's nothing like a good race :-)

Martin
-- 
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Martin_Cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de http://cracauer.cons.org  Fax.: +4940 5228536
"As far as I'm concerned,  if something is so complicated that you can't ex-
 plain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway"- Calvin
