declan@portia.Stanford.EDU (Declan McCullagh) (08/27/90)
In an earlier article, Bob Church (bchurch@oucsace.cs.ohiou.edu) writes: >CHAOS theory is getting a lot of attention these days. I personally think >that one of the first practical applications will be in debugging. I'm >serious. If a home computer with a dozen DA's is too complex to completely >predict think about new systems for running airports, etc. That's where object-oriented programming comes in. I strongly suggest Brad Cox's excellent book on Objective-C entitled _Object_Oriented_Programming: an_Evolutionary_Approach_. This refined approach to programming lends itself to complex programming tasks like the one you described; information hiding/ encapsulation, inheritance, and other features of object-oriented programming environments can take a large programming task and make it manageable... As for whatever debugging is left, it's also a lot easier in object-oriented languages - since you're not programming on the machine level, crashes tend to be less violent and easier to trace. Of course, this programmatical ease comes at a price - performance is somewhat less than that of a more "traditional" language. Interestingly enough, though, the body of the program (source) tends to be considerably smaller. In any case, most people know that hardware performance is increasing at a far greater rate than programmer productivity. -Declan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Olympic Technologies / Registered NeXT Developers \ declan@portia.stanford.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------