From: magnus@thep.lu.se (Magnus Olsson)
Subject: Re: OASYS not Object-Oriented
Organization: Theoretical Physics, Lund University, Sweden
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1992 10:07:33 GMT

In article <rwallace.724242696@unix1.tcd.ie> rwallace@unix1.tcd.ie (russell wallace) writes:
>In <appelo.724066690@dutiak> appelo@dutiak.tudelft.nl (C.J. Appelo) writes:
>>This is all fine with me. But Russel just shouldn't have called it's
>>language object-oriented. I've studied object-oriented languages in the past
>>few months and OASYS doesn't belong in this category. 
>> [...]

>You are correct in saying that a full-blown
>O-O language is essential for O-O software engineering practices,
>particularly data hiding. However, this is not relevant to adventure
>games, which are typically written by one person and are of relatively
>low complexity. 

This is of course your personal opinion. My experience is that
adventure games get sufficiently complex (Dunjin, for example, is
about 6000 lines of Pascal) to benefit from data hiding, full
inheritance and so on.

Please note that this is my personal preference; I suppose some people
might say that "I don't even need local variables for such a small
project". And, sure, the main part of ADVENT is a 4000-line Fortran
program, without any modularization at all...

>Now, whether a particular language is to be called
>"object-oriented" or not comes down to what one takes the words
>"object-oriented language" to mean, debate on which is in the long run
>sterile, so I think we can agree to disagree on whether or not I should
>have called OASYS object-oriented. 

No, I don't think the debate is sterile. If your definition of object
orientation differs enough from the generally accepted one, then your
calling OASYS object-oriented is at best an empty statement, and at
worst positively misleading.

An analogy: I could re-define "functional language" to mean "language
that support function calls", and then market Basic as a functional
language. The ML crowd would be fairly pissed off, though, I guess. 

It's even worse in the case of popular buzz-words like "RISC" and
"Object Orientation"; many people who don't really know what these
words mean are still very impressed by them, and may prefer products
marketed as such even if the claim to be "RISC" or "OO" is totally
bogus. 


>I don't think it is lacking any
>features that are needed for writing adventure games (though it is most
>certainly lacking features that would be needed for writing other types
>of software).

I can't really comment on this, since I haven't used OASYS. It may
well be that you're right. Please note that I'm not implying that your
particular product is in any way inferior to "really" OO languages. 

It's just that I do think things would be simpler if we could all
agree to call a spade a spade, and not try to borrow popular
buzz-words to try to glorify products where they don't really apply. 
 
>"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem"

Indeed.

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