Pascal not considered harmful - was Re: Rich kids are into COBOL

[Eric Smith]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 1:57 PM, ben <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> wrote:
> On 2/19/2015 1:22 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
>> Perhaps what you're questioning is inheritance, which is useful but
>> isn't necessarily a required feature of objects. Inheritance is based
>> on the idea that while two types aren't identical, they may have
>> similarities. As a trivial example, integers and floats are different
>> data types, but they both support arithmetic.

> I think I am, but not math

As I said, numeric types and arithmetic was only a trivial example,
though there are advantages in treating them as objects if it can be
done without significant performance penalty. Smalltalk was the first
object-oriented system that treated even primitive numeric types as
objects, but Simula-67 did not, nor do many of the more recent
object-oriented systems.  Java primitive types aren't really objects,
but by means of an "autoboxing" feature, can be treated as though they
are.

> (where are the decimal libraries?

Some object-oriented environments actually do provide that, including Python.