On Jul 15, 2004, at 1:10 AM, James Giles wrote:
> > The claim that inheritance-based code improves productivity
> > is so common that I usually don't respond to it. There's never
> > been any objective evidence to support the claim that objective
> > coding is more productive. That's not been from lack of looking.
> > There are people (say, in the ACM) who would jump through
> > hoops to find verifiable evidence that inheritance is productive,
> > but no such luck. I think the increased abstraction usually
> > serves more to confuse than to help.
and Drew McCormack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Well, obviously the Fortran 2003 committee disagree, because it's in
> there.
I can't comment on J3/WG5 deliberations before February 1997 concerning
the reasons to put object-oriented features into Fortran, but since that
time there was essentially no argument that it had to be done to improve
productivity.
There was some undercurrent of "C++ has it so we have to have it too."
More importantly, it was recognized that each of the facilities identified
as "support for object-oriented programming" could be useful in the kind
or problems typically attacked by Fortran programs.
If anybody ever does study the effect on productivity of the object-
oriented programming facilities in Fortran 2003 in a systematic way,
we will have some idea whether the effort to add it was worthwhile.
Until then, everybody is just guessing.
--
Van Snyder | What fraction of Americans believe
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Any alleged opinions are my own and have not been approved or disapproved
by JPL, CalTech, NASA, Sean O'Keefe, George Bush, the Pope, or anybody else.
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