Re: Repost of Wainwright message

[Marcus G. Daniels]

TW> Actually, the improvements in speed of Java with JIT are what
TW> brought me back to Swarm after trying to build similar models in a
TW> fully-compiled OO language (Eiffel). 

If I were writing a new simulation engine, I think I'd take a swing
at Mercury.   http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/research/mercury
They've even got a real front-end for GCC. 

TW> The main reason I reject C++ is the same reason I object to
TW> ObjC--It's too easy to write bad (i.e. obscure and loosely typed)
TW> code, resulting in a very long revision/debugging cycle. 

I tend to agree about Objective C.  I just think of it as C with a
runtime library.  I'm glad to have it hidden behind JNI and look
forward to the day when defobj/collections/activity is replaced with
a tighter implementation and the GUI is no longer Tk-based.

Note Java has some of the same `bad' properites of Objective C.  It
tries to add typing, but the lack of generics makes for a lot of
casting sometimes (that you don't bother with in Objective C).  And
dynamic casts can fail, e.g.

class Bar {
}

public class Foo {
    static void main (String args[]) {
        Bar bar = new Bar ();
        
        Foo foo = (Foo) (Object) bar;
    }
}

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