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

[Mouse]

>>> I never could figure out the point of Objects.
>> The point of objects is to support data abstraction by disallowing
>> any old random code in a large system from directly manipulating the
>> innards of the objects, and instead require that to be done by
>> methods declared to be part of the object.

Well, I'd say that's one of the points.  You can get similar effects in
(for example) plain old C by not exporting (for example) struct
definitions.

I don't know what the original point of OO coding was.  But I would say
that now, OO is not so much any particular language feature (such as
internals hiding) or any single goal (such as abstraction) as it is a
mindset.  I would say that OO code can be written in any language
(well, any general-purpose language; some esolangs, such as Malbolge or
Befunge, are so difficult to use at all that OO is probably out of
reach), right down to assembler.

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