RE: Qualified sub-procedures

["Bartell, Aaron L. (TC)" <ALBartell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Aaron:  The question basically boils down to: "Should RPG become an
object-oriented language?", right?

For the most part I would agree, yes.  I would restate it saying that RPG
should try to gain some of the more common and extremely useful aspects of
OO design.

<snip>
IMHO, OO is not a very good fit for compiled languages like RPG and
COBOL and C.  On the other hand, OO really hits its stride in
interpreted languages like Object REXX, Python, Smalltalk, and Ruby.
One problem with compiled languages is that they like to have strong
type checking, which unnecessarily complicates OO models, IMO. Sure,
strong typing can detect certain coding errors at compile time. But
more often than not, it's a nuisance to get rid of all the type
mismatch errors by recasting the types of object references. (Then
again, frequent use of recasting may indicate a poor design to begin
with!) Interpreted OO languages do not burden you with things like
interfaces, virtual classes and functions, type recasting, etc.
</snip>

I can't speak to much to this because I haven't used very many Interpreted
OO languages.  One thing that I would like to comment on though is that with
any language you can develop poorly.  Just because a language might give you
great flexibility to develop however you want doesn't mean that it is a
"problem" language.  Some people don't like it when they see pointers being
used in RPG.  Does that make RPG bad just because that person hasn't learned
how to use pointers yet or maybe the person that programmed the pointers
isn't using them correctly?


>Bottom line:  If you want to do OO development, then you should probably be
using an OO language.
I agree, and if RPG could be that language that would be great!  :-)

Thanks for your comments Hans,
Aaron Bartell