Re: ObjC additions (Was: Re: PROPOSAL: Objective-C++)

[Philippe C.D. Robert]

Hi,

On Tue, 20 Nov 2001 09:43:18 +0100
Bjoern Giesler <giesler@ira.uka.de> wrote:
> adding my .02 Euro...

...adding my .02 Rappen...;-)

> Am Dienstag, 20. November 2001 01:33 schrieb Björn Gohla:
> > On Monday 19 November 2001 23:45, Ovidiu Predescu wrote:
> > > 1. Exception handling.
> Seconded. I'd like to see this as well. Personally, though, I'd prefer 
> something along the lines of Python, which has try...except...finally but 
> also try...except...else (the else gets executed in case no exception has 
> occurred).
> > > 2. Class variables. A "must add" in my opinion, as the current way of
> > > defining them using static variables is far from being acceptable. 
> Yep.
> > > 3. Blocks, as described by Brad Cox.
> Yep.
> > > 4. Syntactic sugars for constant property objects.
> Yep.

Uhm ... just one question: why? There are rate situations where such features 
really are needed. So while I agree that there are (some) situations where such 
(theoretical/academical) add ons might be 'nice', I much more fear languages 
which are too complicated, bloated, have too many features etc. ... and I know 
what I am talking about, I earn my living writing C++ code...;-)

Smart (the car company) once had a brilliant PR strategy saying: Reduce to the 
max! This is exactly what we need and what makes ObjC such a beautiful 
language! 

> > 5. how about operators? 
> Please, no. IMHO, you don't gain much with this, but it makes debugging a 
> nightmare. I'm in the process of debugging a program which makes use of 
> operator overloading in C++. I don't want operators. No. :-/

Well.... I should actually agree, esp. after my statement above, *but* did you 
ever do maths in ObjC ... *Very* ugly and *very* annoying (not to speak of 
string handling in OpenStep/ObjC...).
 
Anyway, let me throw in another issue. Coming from a parallel world (SGI 
machines with only 1 CPU are bastards...grin) I'd vote for another feature:

- synchronisable blocks and methods

But then, maybe this would do harm to the simplicity of the language as well...

-Phil
-- 
Philippe C.D. Robert
Software Engineer
Silicon Graphics, Inc.