Object Programing and Objective C

[Al Globus]

> 
> Does Objective C provide what Smalltalk calls "blocks"?  

No.
> 
> Nevertheless, I have two reservations about Objective C.
> 
> (1) If and when someone implements a production-quality
> compiler for Smalltalk (incremental compilers already exist),
> it seems Objective C will be, in comparison, a less coherent
> jumble of two languages.

The beauty of Objective C is that it is a nice bridge between
current programming practice (in C anyway) and an 'objective future'.
You can integrate Objective C into current systems and get a 
smooth transition.  I.e., Objective C is not seen, even by
its creators, as the ultimate language, but rather as a useful
tool that working programers can use today.  I like it, in part,
because I can still use all of my C programming chops and I'm in
a nice familiar environment, not a complete change as the transition
from C to SMALLTALK would be.

> 
> (2) My second reservation is actually a criticism of inheritance
> in general.  While it is very true that data-abstraction helps
> improve the modularity of a program, inheritance requires that
> a person trying to implement a particular (sub)class need understand
> many, if not all, of the details in its chain of superclasses.
> 
> Rather than subclass to extend the functionality of an object,
> I think a more modular approach involves implementing the
> extension by USING the original object as part of the "rep".

You can use this approach in both SMALLTALK and Objective C, except that
you must inherit the properties of the Object class.