NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/lang/c++-part1/4305

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From: [e-mail] (Marco Antoniotti)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Why garbage collection?
Date: 29 Jan 1996 09:58:54 -0800
Organization: International Computer Science Institute
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In-reply-to: "Stefan Monnier"'s message of 29 Jan 1996 09:41:36 GMT
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In article <4ei4og$[e-mail]> "Stefan Monnier" <[e-mail]> writes:

   From: "Stefan Monnier" <[e-mail]>
   Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.c++
   Date: 29 Jan 1996 09:41:36 GMT
   Organization: Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
   Lines: 30
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   Originator: [e-mail] (Stefan Monnier)
   Xref: agate comp.lang.lisp:20701 comp.lang.c++:171908

   In article <4ecmfo$[e-mail]>,
   Vlastimil Adamovsky <[e-mail]> wrote:
   ] [e-mail] (Bruno Haible) wrote:
   ] >Just look at the technical strength of the argument that GC is not
   ] >"in the tradition of the C community"...
   ] The technical strength of the argument is that C++ is still low level
   ] language with a high level language advantage and as such one it
   ] should do the all low level operations itself and if it is needed, it
   ] should implement the high level features by using its own low level
   ] implementations.

   You mean like the virtual table stuff that could be implemented
   with low-level
   operations but instead is well hidden ? At least well enough to
   make C++-objects
   very inconvenient to represent any low-level data-structure.

   Little example: the vtable can be considered a class-pointer, but
   C++ has been
   well enough designed to make it impossible for you to explicitely
   add any kind
   of info to the vtable.

This is probably off-track, but, as a diversion, please bear this last
gripe of mine on the language which is going to be swapped away by
Java (no, it is not Lisp :) ).

One of the things that bothered me most with C++, was this sort of
"newspeak" which it introduced.  For years people had been working in
Flavors, Clos, Smalltalk etc, and they pretty much shared a common
terminology.  Then suddendly, we did not have "methods" any more, we
had "member functions", we lost the "inheritance" (pun intended) and
started "deriving classes".

Of course, the argument is that C++ wanted to "clarify" such things
and the choice of new terminology was a "good thing".

Well, I must say that I am very pleased to see that Java somewhat
reintroduced the "old" terminology and that Lisp, (as well as Dylan)
is not yet dead.

Half seriously yours
--
Marco Antoniotti - Resistente Umano
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