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.
No difference there. Nobody is going to take your Objective-C compiler
away from you, and it will continue to work just as you expect.
Whereas your changes would be fairly dramatic changes to Objective-C...
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.
Who says you have to throw your code away? Just leave it as is. A
Smalltalk that runs on top of the Objective-C runtime obviously
interoperates seamlessly with Objective-C objects, because from the
runtimes point of view, objects/classes implemented in
Objective-Smalltalk are (largely/fully) indistinguishable from objects
implemented in Objective-C.
Remember: the runtime is where the music is, the "language" bit of
Objective-C is just a little bit of syntactic sugar thrown on top.
Once stuff is compiled, as long as it interoperates with
objc_msgSend(), who cares what syntax you used to specify it? Could be
Objective-Assembler for all anyone would know...
Marcel
--
Marcel Weiher Metaobject Software Technologies
email@hidden www.metaobject.com
The simplicity of power HOM, IDEAs, MetaAd etc.
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