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From: sdl@lyra.mitre.org (Steven D. Litvinchouk)
Subject: Re: ada-c++ productivity
In-Reply-To: jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM's message of 21 Mar 91 21:06:32 GMT
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	<1991Mar10.151220.2581@forwiss.uni-passau.de>
	<11966@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <jls.669170444@rutabaga>
	<1991Mar20.201633.15564@ucunix.san.uc.edu> <jls.669589592@rutabaga>
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Date: 25 Mar 91 12:59:15


In article <jls.669589592@rutabaga> jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM (Jim Showalter) writes:

> INHERITANCE-oriented languages and non-inheritance oriented languages.
> An inheritance-oriented language supports the notion of classes, instances
> of classes, subclasses, inheritance of operations, local overriding of
> inherited operations, etc. THAT is the fundamental distinction that
> should be emphasized, and that is why I'd like to retire the term
> object-oriented as largely irrelevant and/or misleading.

This raises an issue I would like to see discussed more often.
Namely, does a language need to support modules or packages in
addition to classes, in order to be considered truly
"software-engineering oriented" as well as "inheritance-oriented?"
Eiffel supports classes, but not groupings of these class declarations
into packages or modules.  Classes are apparently the library units of
management as well as semantic declarations in Eiffel.  On the other
hand, Modula-3 considers classes just a kind of type declaration, and
you can have several such class declarations in a module.

Personally, I have never found classes alone to be a complete
substitute for packages or modules.  I frequently need to consider
several related classes as comprising a single concept, which must be
developed as a single software unit (module).  At least the
Smalltalk-80 environment supports class categories.


--
Steven Litvintchouk
MITRE Corporation
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	"Where does he get those wonderful toys?"
