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Re: Mac OS X presents an opportunity for Dylan
On 11/30/00 8:45 PM, the artist formerly known as Michael Schuerig,
(schuerig@acm.org), issued a press release stating:
> It might be possible to adapt Cocoa to Dylan. I doubt that it'd feel
> natural.
Well, if you adopt a single inheritance hierarcy that mirrors the NeXT
frameworks, and simply map the instance methods to Dylan generic functions,
why wouldn't it work? You could certainly go farther, and create a Dylan
framwork that wrapped/called the NeXT frameworks, or even build a version of
DUIM on top of Cocoa/NeXT.
In other words, it's a lot easier going from Dylan's generic functions and
multiple inheritance to Objective-C's single inheritance and message passing
(which is really just OO with all methods specializing on their first
argument only - the selector) than the other way round. I've actually tried
to do generic functions in Smalltalk, and it gets ugly real fast, even
setting aside performance considerations (method dispatch is *way* slower
than a compiled Dylan).
--
Raffael Cavallaro, Ph.D.
raffael@mediaone.net
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