sakkinen@tukki.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen) (09/22/89)
I have submitted so many diverse articles in this group lately that it seems fair to expose the soapbox I am standing on; it might help you in assessing my contributions. 1. I have grown a firm conviction that C is much too unsafe and tricky for any really good and reliable object-oriented language to be built as an extension of C. This goes for both the "integrated" approach of C++ and the "hybrid" approach of e.g. Objective-C. 2. As a corollary of (1), I hope that the C-based languages won't win too large a share of the OOPL market. 3. Since it seems obvious that, in spite of my opposition, the C-based languages in general and C++ in particular will be very prominent on the market, I sincerely hope them to become as good as possible. 4. Several principles and features of C++ are, in my opinion, very well thought out - above the average of current OOPL's. Such seems to be the case with the multiple inheritance scheme. Those principles are worth advertising to the designers and developers of other languages. (They may not be eager to listen to well-known C++ enthusiasts in all cases.) 5. I have no personal quarrels with Bjarne Stroustrup, although his political goals must be opposite to (2) above. On the contrary, he has been very helpful and cooperative. Markku Sakkinen Department of Computer Science University of Jyvaskyla (a's with umlauts) Seminaarinkatu 15 SF-40100 Jyvaskyla (umlauts again) Finland