Re: TRM - Morbidity has set in, or not?

Hmmmm....

>From memory of Smalltalk (and I admit it's been a while), the term
"message passing" actually illuminates rather than obscures. Although message passing might *look like* function invocation, it isn't. Conceptually, an object passes a message (one way or another) to another object asking it to do something. Objects don't call or invoke each other per se.

The problem with OOP as observed by most these days is that it is object oriented imperative programming. At the end of the day, most OOPLs are simply fancier ways of arranging assignment statements, just like folks have been doing since the days of machine code. The fundamental abstraction is changes to a machine store. This is why you can make your comment about state throughout the program; the program is all about managing state. You could conceivably come up with an object oriented functional language, and I'm fairly sure at some point object oriented Prolog has been tried. It depends how valuable the tenets of object oriented programming are to you. (It would be much easier if there was deep-level agreement on what the fundamental tenets of object oriented programming are; basics, like what *is* an object ? what does an object *mean* ?)

I'm still dreaming of a language, much like Haskell, with relations as first class citizens.

• Tony