Re: how to design a replacement for C++
On Jul 29, 2:38 am, Daniel <danielapar...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Jul 27, 9:49 am, James Kanze <james.ka...@gmail.com>
wrote:> Some of the things [Java] incorporates from C++ are
things we later learned
were errors, to be avoided (i.e. putting the function definitions inside the
class...).
Not sure who are the "we",
Software engineers, concerned with reliably developing code on
large projects.
but I know a lot of people won't follow you
on that one. Do you know any more recent languages that have copied
the C++ idea of splitting the implementation of a class, putting some
of it in a "header" file and the rest in a "source" file?
Do you know of any recent language that is designed for large
scale software development, as opposed to animating web pages or
the like?
This is a serious question. I'm not familiar with all recent
languages, but the ones I do know are mostly scripting
languages, or only slightly above, and are not suited for large
scale development. The most recent languages I've seen designed
for large scale development are C++ and Ada 95, and Ada 95 has
an even stricter separation than C++.
Do you see an advantage in separating the class data members
in one file and the implementation in another, except for the
inlined implementation which goes in the header?
Different people work on them. Also, most build systems have
file level granularity; you don't want a change in the
implementation to trigger a recompilation of all of the client
code.
This doesn't seem to me to be a particularly
useful way to organize code. More useful is to separate interface
from implementation, which is not the point of .h and .cpp.
The separation could be better. Much better. (There's
a proposal to add modules to C++.) For example, it would be
better (although perhaps hard to implement) if the private part
of a class wasn't in the header file. The use of textual
inclusion for the separation of interface from implementation is
a hack. It works, sort of, but there are clearly better
solutions (e.g. Modula-2 or Ada). But it's also better than
nothing at all.
--
James Kanze