[NTLUG:Discuss] Evil GCC-2.96

[Will Senn]

Christopher wrote:
     To be a wag, the kernel isn't written in C++, nor is XFree86,
     nor Emacs, nor TeX, nor Perl, nor Python, nor Apache, nor GLIBC.
     If none of those important Linux-related programs are written in C++,
     why would anyone consider C++ to be of any importance?  :-)

Sheesh! How provincial :)
I once had a professor that told me that all object oriented programming
was just syntactical sugar.  He said, "Oh, yeah. We've been following
Object Oriented Programming practices for years.  We use typedefs,
ifdefines,
structs and various other mechanisms to achieve exactly the same results."
When I put forth the idea that Procedural Programming and high level
languages
in general were just syntactical sugar, for some reason he objected.  I then
explained that we Assembly Language hacks had been following the same
rigorous
procedural principals for years...  Then something hit me - what if one were
to
program in machine code - could they manage reuseable object oriented
programming?
Absolutely!  It would probably be easier with a tiny bit of syntactical
sugar though.
C++ may not be as little used as you have suggested, but it is not as wide
spread
as it should be either. OOP is a very powerful paradigm, I think that it has
the
potential to replace most non-oop methodologies.  C++ is too complicated to
be
the vehicle though.  Java - too slow!  Smalltalk, hmmm - may still come out
on
top.  Maybe a language is too small a medium for OO to shine.  Think Zope.
A system
of objects, where the language is a core part of a larger system of objects.

Anyway, just thinkin' out loud. To your point of why anyone would consider
C++ to
be of any importance?  Retorical though it was, C++ was the biggest OO play
in the
genesis of OO, a revolution in programming culture.

Food for thought,

Will