RE: Using OO concepts in RPG

[Hans <boldt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Booth Martin wrote:
> As to your demand that the head of the RPG Compiler team step down??? 
> Maybe
>  just maybe Joe, you are a tad out of line?  His bosses know what he's
>  doing

Technically, there's not one person who's specifically identified as a "team 
leader". Generally, decisions are made by a consensus of the team members. 
On the other hand, a language enhancement on the scale of OO would require 
much additional staff, which would necessitate approvals from umpteen 
levels of management, each of which would ask ever tougher questions to 
justify the cost.

But first, there's the question of what an OO RPG would look like. Do you 
want a C++-like OO language? or a Java-like OO language? or a 
Smalltalk-like language? or a Python-like OO language? or a Perl-like OO 
language? or an OREXX-like OO language? or an ObjectiveC-like OO language? 
or an Eiffel-like OO language? I'm sure the answer to this question is 
crystal clear to those who've done OO programming in any *one* of these 
languages. But to this particular programmer, the answer is far from clear. 
And if you thought the debates around a free-form RPG were "interesting", 
the debate on what a OO-RPG should look like promises to be even more so. 
Like I said before, that's a debate I'd rather watch from the sidelines.

But even more fundamentally, exactly what problem is OO in RPG intended to 
solve? And how could an OO-RPG solve those problems better than, say Java 
or OREXX or Python or C++? Don't forget that you can already use Java 
objects within RPG programs. So RPG programmers already have access to the 
vast functionality of the Java class library.

Cheers! Hans