Algol vs Fortran was RE: VHDL vs Verilog

One thing I've said for years: C++ is a language that *enables* OOP, but does not enforce it. (IMHO Philippe Kahn "did wonders to malign the image of OO" as he promoted Borland's related products.) I remember doing some work in Smalltalk and thinking, this is really OOP. That doesn't mean it was the way to do everything I wanted to do. OOP is a way of looking at problems. Functional programming is a way of looking at problems. Declarative, imperative, etc., etc. E.g., FORTRAN is an implementation of a specific instance of a way to look at a specific set of problems. All that we do in programming languages is to find meaningful ways to map our 'questions, queries, posers' onto the machines we've built, which underneath it all aren't (for the largest part) really all that different than when we started building computers. No programming language I've seen is attempting to or suitable for finding the nine billion names of God*. Nor have I seen a job posting for a programmer for such a position. This is probably why I rarely get involved in debates about programming languages - unless the subject is COBOL, which I think is an abomination, or Java, which is something you drink, not code in. -- Ian *Clarke, Arthur C: The Nine Billion Names of God (orig. 1953 in 'Star Science Fiction Stories, repub. 1958 in 'The Other Side of the Sky') ________________________________________ From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Josh Dersch [derschjo at mail.msu.edu] Sent: Wednesday, February 10, 2010 9:21 PM To: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Algol vs Fortran was RE: VHDL vs Verilog I think that C++ did wonders to malign the image of OO. C++ is just barely OO anyway -- it barely has compile-time encapsulation and has no real run-time encapsulation, memory management is still almost entirely manual (which people may argue is a good thing, but in the face of C++ exceptions and other C++ features, it's a HUGE issue since it makes memory management all that more difficult to do correctly), and compilers have taken a long time to catch up to the point where they generate decent code. -- Josh