extended C with classes -- is this for sale yet?

dan at bbncd dan at bbncd
Thu Jul 28 11:41:54 AEST 1983


From:  Dan Franklin <dan at bbncd>

There is no connection between Stroustrup's work and Brad Cox's.  Cox's work,
originally done at ITT as OOPC, essentially embeds some of the Smalltalk
programming language ideas in C; it provides a more "dynamic" programming
environment, in which programs can perform operations on data objects ("send
messages") without knowing at compile time precisely what objects are going to
be involved.  Stroustrup's classes are entirely a compile-time construct, which
means that they are less flexible, but also less expensive (i.e., little or no
runtime overhead, as opposed to Cox's system which has a fancy, somewhat more
expensive subroutine call for sending messages to objects).

	Dan Franklin



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