Conversation started Oct 25, 2016 at 15:26.
amon
amon
Oct 25, 2016 15:26
@jrh RE Verb(noun) vs. noun.Verb() – There is no real need for a syntactical distinction, e.g. Julia allows the former syntax, but it also uses multi-methods, which is a bit unusual. The whole verb vs noun distinction is only useful for OOP as a design approach, not for OOP as a concept or implementation technique.
The dot-notation becomes immediately obvious when you implement vtable-based OOP yourself in C. A vtable is a struct of function pointers. To call a method, you access the function pointer in the vtable struct, then also pass the object as invocant/this-parameter.
I've implemented an example here. Of course that uses a lot of dereferencing access "->" instead of normal struct access ".", but that's just C for you. In C++, object pointers are rarely used – objects usually are either references which allow method calls with ".", or are values that do not support polymorphic calls since their exact type is known at compile time.
enderland
enderland
@amon I about pinged you when jrh was asking that yesterday as it felt like the exact thing which would peak your interest ;-)
amon
amon
Some later languages use "->" for method calls (Perl, PHP); most prefer dot notation (Java, C#, nearly everything else). Exceptions (well, actually they predate C++) are Smalltalk which uses juxtaposition ("object method", "object method: arg", "object everything: is named: arg"). And Objective-C, which uses the circumfix operator [] as in [object method], but is otherwise Smalltalk-like
@jrh Unless you use polymorphism (and most code doesn't use polymorphism), OOP as used by most programmers is 100% a namespace management technique. Method calls are effectively a macro that substitutes a.b(...) with typeof(a)_b(a, ...)
@enderland Yes, please ping me for programming language stuff. I tend to read the transcript, and I tend to be asleep when such interesting discussions happen in another timezone, but such notifications are always appreciated.
 
Conversation ended Oct 25, 2016 at 15:37.