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From: adaworks@netcom.com (AdaWorks)
Subject: Re: C++ not OOP? (Was: Language Efficiency
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Date: Tue, 6 Jun 1995 03:09:39 GMT
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David Chase (chase@centerline.com) wrote:

: No, at the time Cobol was originally chosen, there weren't that many
: alternatives, and we knew a hell of a lot less than we know now.  Once
: you choose a language, you tend to stick with it.  

  Catch up.  Although the current COBOL standard (ANSI 85) is not an OOPL,
  it is considerably improved over earlier incarnations.  In some ways it
  has semantic and syntactic properties superior to some of our beloved
  OOP languages.

: Again -- Fortran's very old, and it's been in use for a very long time.

  FORTRAN 90 is a significant improvement over the FORTRAN you and I learned
  in undergraduate school. It is still not OOP, but it is not to be scoffed
  at.  Who was it that said, "I don't know what language we'll be using in
  the year 2000, but I do know it will be called FORTRAN."
  
: that make it well-suited for efficient numerical coding.  Other popular
: languages (C, C++) still haven't dealt with this.  The changes to Fortran
: over the years have been gradual, and relatively easy to understand
: (Fortran 77 was quite tame, Fortran 90 is a good deal more complex.
: But, the old code is still legal under the new standard.)

  Thank you. I would not classify it as complex, but I do find its model
  for genericity a little unsatisfactory compared to C++, Eiffel, and Ada.

: Compare this with (for instance, an example I know relatively well)
: the evolution of Fortran.  I haven't actually tried this experiment,
: but looking at the Fortran 90 spec, I get the distinct impression I
: could feed any legal Fortran 66 program to a Fortran 90 compiler,
: and get satisfactory results.  It's still got card image input format,
: equivalence, and multiple entry points.  These features are all noted
: as "obsolete", but they're there.  The people sticking with Fortran
: get support for their old code.  

  One of my favorite features of the new Ada standard is its new-found
  friendliness towards FORTRAN.  I find it quite lovely that we can
  incorporate well-debugged FORTRAN into re-engineered software systems
  using the wrapper model (via Ada package encapsulation features) and
  avoid re-doing all the good stuff that smart people figured out a long
  time ago.

  Richard Riehle
  adaworks@netcom.com


-- 
                                             adaworks@netcom.com
