On Apr 3, 2005, at 11:55 PM, James B. Tuley wrote:
I think Marcel's point is that being a strict superset of C which is
useful in OS X when most of your libraries are C and very singular, if
you get rid of that aspect, how is it different from SmallTalk? I
think the likely answer to that is it would be a similar language that
is not quite as good.
Yes, but with an important difference to Smalltalk: it still allows me
to compile and use my already existing ObjC code with only moderate or
no changes.
Moving to Smalltalk, or that matter any other language, means throwing
existing code away. Is the hypothetical introduction of one single
high-level feature really worth the price of throwing the whole
language and with it all existing source code away ? I say no.
Just because Sun has recently added generics to Java doesn't mean
that it has suddenly turned into Ada or C++. Just like the addition
of the reflection APIs to Java in version 1.2 hasn't turned it into
ObjC or Smalltalk :)
Oh and generics would be pretty useful for objective-c from a language
aspect, then you wouldn't need to name things like AddObject: AddInt:
you could do Add<int>: Add<id>: and have your primitives boxed, rather
than using NSNumber in that instance or NSValue, which gets really
chunky looking in code.
I wonder if some of these things that seem too much for being a
strict-c superset, may not be in the future. Such as if c code
compiled with http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/ could give a slightly modified
objective-c runtime might give more introspection.
But maybe not, I liked taking Compilers and Languages for the Language
part not the Compiler part :-P
But implementing compilers is soo much more fun then designing a
programming language :)
Regards,
Dietmar Planitzer
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