On 1998-03-16 classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu said to lisard(a)zetnet.co.uk :> I HATE object oriented stuff. Hate it, hate it, hate it. At least :>in C++, Java, and Visual Basic, which have been my only expoures :>to it. we disagree. there are several flavors (sic) of object-oriented programming, and whilst some of them are the invention of a sick and twisted mind (c++), some of them are just damn fine coffee... ;> visual basic isn't OO, don't be confused. and strongly typed OO systems should probably not be used for anything small or prototypical. however, we'd urge you to take a look at some other object oriented languages. smalltalk, common lisp, self, oberon, etc. *much* nicer. and then grab a forth and roll your own :> :I'be not tried VB, and almost zero Java, but I had to use Ada for :three years. oh, someone else. we had to do that, thanks to bradford university's oh so wonderful degree course. and to think that the oxonians were moaning about modula-2... we've used vb and java reasonably extensively. both are far too typed. vb doesn't even have inheritance, which renders it pretty much useless. :Ada 95 has a lot of OO features (though you needn't :use it that way). It is my most unfavourite language. Some of us :have described Ada as a read-only language (cf. C as a write-only :language). not even that. it takes up too much space, and the preferred format places variable names in capitals, rendering them almost entirely unreadable. and the OO features are only a glorified type-extension mechanism - oberon's idea, but done by committee in ada95. ada is a disgusting language, not because it is verbose or hard to program, but because it introduces another language - and a vast one at that - without giving anything *new*; it doesn't give value for money. size without content. -- Communa (together) we remember... we'll see you falling you know soft spoken changes nothing to sing within her...