craig@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Craig Jarchow) (12/11/90)
I have a two questions regarding the Think Class Library (TCL):
1. What is the performance penalty associated with TCL? I think TCL is great
for the user interface, but should the number-crunching guts of my code
be procedural instead of object-oriented? For example, suppose my
application deals with many points, each with associated arrays/variables
that describe it's position and properties. The application requires that
I search through many such points until I find an appropriate one, then
extract necessary info from the point. For obvious reasons, I'd like each
point to be an instance of a point class, but will my search process
be significantly faster if I load all the points and their properties into
multidimensional arrays?
2. The TCL section of the user's manual seems to imply that the differences
between TCL and C++ are minimal (see pg. 193). The manual suggests that
the primary differences are TCL's lack of the 'virtual' keyword and its
requirement that 'new' and 'delete' have parentheses. Correct me if I'm
wrong, but TCL appears more distant from C++ than this. Unless some
pages are missing from my manual,it seems to me that TCL also lacks the
following:
a. The '//' comments.
b. public:, private:, and protected: keywords.
c. 'friend' functions.
d. The 'class' keyword (!!).
e. Operator overloading.
f. Type safe linking.
g. References.
h. Constant member functions.
Also, the constructor and destructor syntax is different. These differences
suggest that porting classes from C++ to TCL (or vice versa) would be a
*big* job. Right?
Are there any rumors floating around regarding Symantec's future plans for
Think C (i.e. might it someday be called Think C++) ???????
Thanks,
Craig.