Re: of applications for gnustep...

[Pascal Bourguignon]

Eric Christopherson writes:
> I don't see why relatedness matters. C and assembly are only related insofar
> as C generally is translated into assembly. I don't know Pascal or Modula-3,
> but I can easily see that in some projects the developer might find it
> convenient to use more than one language, since different languages have
> different strengths. And if you can mix them in one project, I don't see any
> reason why they shouldn't be mixed in one translation unit, as long as it
> doesn't generate unresolvable problems with syntax, scope, etc.

A further  thought: There are big difficulties  to reconciliate object
language models.

You cannot  take a Java class,  make a subclass if  it in Objective-C,
further make a subclass of the subclass in C++ and finally have a leaf
subclass of the  C++ class in CLOS. Even  taken two-by-two most object
oriented  languages  are  sufficiently  different  so as  to  make  it
impossible.  If it's not the method dispatching it's the ivars or some
uncommon concept that makes it impossible.

That's why you need less  to mix languages in the procedural paradigm:
all you need,  is a common convention about  procedure calling and the
common variables, and you can  link Fortran libraries with C libraries
with Pascal and have calls in every directions.

But  that's  not possible  in  object  oriented  languages, hence  the
solution to have  a compiler that understand both  Objective-C and C++
and that  is capable of  handling both kind  of object systems  in the
same language.   If you wanted to mix  Java, you would have  to have a
ObjC+Java+C++  compiler  (and  good  luck  with  the  syntax  and  the
semantics!)



Objective-C is  relatively very well  behavied in this  respect: since
everything is done in run-time, and  its run-time has a C API, you can
send Objective-C messages  from whatever language is able  to call a C
function (most of them).


-- 
__Pascal_Bourguignon__                   http://www.informatimago.com/
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