Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] Next Step

[Richard J. <ri...@an...>]

On Mon, Oct 06, 2003 at 09:42:09PM +0200, Nicolas Cannasse wrote:
> BTW, objects are certainly the worst part of OCaml. They are tricky,
> difficult to use, and have bad performances (compared to modules instances).
> If you look at Java programmers (or most of the OO programmers actually)
> they're using OO only for prototyping ( interfaces in Java or pure virtual
> classes in C++ ). In Ocaml , you can already prototype by using a module and
> add specialisation with some polymorphic closures. Believe me : you don't
> need objects.

Unfortunately objects have a certain very large mindshare over simple
abstract data types. I'm not sure most commercial Java programmers
would even know what an ADT was ...

In OCaml objects have a major syntactic advantage, in as much as it's
easier and nicer to type:

  hash#find "foo"

vs.

  Hashtbl.find hash "foo"

Shame that OCaml doesn't have some syntactic sugar to solve this.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj
Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/ - all your business data are belong to you.
NET::FTPSERVER is a full-featured, secure, configurable, database-backed
FTP server written in Perl: http://www.annexia.org/freeware/netftpserver/