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From: jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony)
Subject: Re: What is wrong with OO ?
In-Reply-To: Matt Austern's message of 03 Jan 1997 13:08:26 -0800
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Date: Tue, 7 Jan 1997 00:07:04 GMT
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In article <fxtu3oysbzp.fsf@isolde.mti.sgi.com> Matt Austern <austern@isolde.mti.sgi.com> writes:

> jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony) writes:
> 
> > Oh, I don't know.  I think C++ was created simply because BS was
> > saddled with C (at ATT) and wanted _something_ that had a least _some_
> > abstraction capabilities in it.  Voila.  C++.  Whether it is any more
> > "usable" than several other options is highly open to question.  And
> > in fact, in general I would say the answer is "no".
> 
> It's not necessary to speculate on why Bjarne Stroustrup made the
> design decisions that he did: he discusses them, in a fair amount
> of detail, in _The Design and Evolution of C++_.

He also gave various descriptions of this process while it was
happening cira 87-89 and I happened to attend some of these.


> he was trying to create a language that, like C, made it possible to
> write low-level programs, but that also, like Simula, included
> high-level abstraction facilities.  

Exactly.  This came from his direct experience of having to recode a
Simula program for his thesis into BCPL.  The resulting nightmare was
not something he wished to have to go through again.  When getting to
ATT and seeing that it was C or nothing, he decided to "fix it" before
suffering the same experience.

/Jon
-- 
Jon Anthony
Organon Motives, Inc.
Belmont, MA 02178
617.484.3383
jsa@organon.com

