Inheritance in Revolution?

[Richard Gaskin]

Dan Shafer wrote:

> At the end of the day, speaking as an old Smalltalker who thinks objects 
> rule, I've just had give up on the OO dream when  using Rev. As you've 
> learned, it's not implemented and although there are some worthy 
> work-alikes, they're not really satisfactory to an OO thinker.
> 
> There has been a lot of back-channel talk about either creating an OO 
> version of Transcript or forking a new IDE/Language combo for OO folks 
> but my guess is that's a pretty distant dream at this point.

Yes, if the goal is OOP.  But OOP is a means to an end, not an end in 
itself.

If the goal is to implement OOP as a merely intellectual exercise, Rev 
will be a disappointing experiment.

But if the goal is to get results that benefit development and 
maintenance of software systems, there's likely a highly profitable way 
to achieve those ends in Rev as it is today.

This is not to suggest that OOP is without value; on the contrary, I've 
seen otherwise.  But I've also seen the Mac Toolbox and other non-OOP 
systems that still get great benefit from well-structured interfaces 
that achieve similar results.  And with a million fewer JSRs. ;)

The original poster presented a practical problem, and a practical 
solution was offered that was simple and incurs only 0.006ms of overhead 
on a modest computer (using a frontScript to allow well-factored code 
that applies only to specific objects).  It's not OOP, but it gets the 
job done and lets the developer move on to the next challenge....

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
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  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com