The language was part of my academic course work.
OK it was not a OO language but - in 1968 - it had strict type checking, structures, user-defined types, enums, void, casts, user-defined operators (overloaded) both infix and prefix, (all defined on a formal mathematical basis giving syntax and semantics) Together with “environment enquiries” to find out how big an int was or the precision of a float.
Users could also define their own operators - think about it as no more that strange names of a variable or procedure - and also allocate priority to the various operators in that world (monadics ALWAYS had a priority of 10 and bound tightest). But it went too far. You could define (note that the concept of += did not exist in the base language in 1968) a new operator such as “+:=“
op +:= = (ref in a, int b) ref int: a:=a+b; € It took a pointer to an int, and int and returned the pointer
[Of course you could also define it to be
op +:= = (ref in a, int b) ref int: a:=a-b+7;
]
My move to unix and C in the 70s was a huge retro step for me - but I could not develop systems code in Algol68 - for example the transput library was about 8K before your blinked. Certainly in C we could code more and faster - no type-checking and we had enuf experience of compilers to understand what was going on at the machine code level - we could just drive the I/O registers directly.
Then C++? Like microsoft windows I evaluated, tried it a bit and voted the theory good but the smell bad. I had a few students who wrote in C++ over a few years, but you know what, it did not do anything earth shattering and it could be a b*gger to work on a debug of a 20K line student program! Like some here I think C++ was just on the wrong side of a line that I dont understand. Similarly, for me, perl is on one side of that line and python is far over the other side.
My question is:
What is that line? I dont understand it? Effort input vs output? Complexity measure, debugging complexity in a 3rd party program? [I hated assembler too unless it was my own (or good) ;-)] But machine code was good, few people would do too much in a complicated way writing in binary/octal/hex!
Perhaps for the first time in my career, I am about to disagree with Doug McIlroy. Sorry, Doug, but I feel the essence of object-oriented computing is not operator overloading but the representation of behavior. I know you love using o.o. in OO languages, but that is syntax, not semantics, and OO, not o.o., is about semantics.
And of course, the purest of the OO languages do represent arithmetic as methods, but the fit of OO onto C was never going to be smooth.
-rob
> o operator overloading
>
> I never could figure out why Stroustrup implemented that "feature"; let's
> see, this operator usually means this, except when you use it in that
> situation in which case it means something else. Now, try debugging that.
Does your antipathy extend to C++ IO and its heavily overloaded << and >>?
The essence of object-oriented programming is operator overloading. If you
think integer.add(integer) and matrix.add(matrix) are good, perspicuous,
consistent style, then you have to think that integer+integer and
matrix+matrix are even better. To put it more forcefully: the OO style
is revoltingly asymmetric. If you like it why don't you do everyday
arithmetic that way?
I strongly encouraged Bjarne to support operator overloading, used it
to write beautiful code, and do not regret a bit of it. I will agree,
though, that the coercion rules that come along with operator (and
method) overloading are dauntingly complicated. However, for natural uses
(e.g. mixed-mode arithmetic) the rules work intuitively and well.
Mathematics has prospered on operator overloading, and that's why I
wanted it. My only regret is that Bjarne chose to set the vocabulary of
infix operators in stone. Because there's no way to inroduce new ones,
users with poor taste are tempted to recycle the old ones for incongruous
purposes.
C++ offers more features than C and thus more ways to write obscure code.
But when it happens, blame the writer, not the tool.
Doug