Re: Book again, was Dylan (was: ARC)

[Shriram Krishnamurthi <address@hidden>]

Johan Ovlinger wrote:

> There is a bit of a pitfall you stumble into if you have two languages with
> ALMOST the same semantics and try to integrate them tightly -- e.g.
> subclassing Java classes with (J)Python classes.  I tried this as a rapid
> development approach recently, and then subsequently spent the rest of the
> week trying to find a non-existant bug in my code; it turns out that python's
> method dispatch semantics are close enough to java's to make overriding of
> java methods with python methods work most of the time, but NOT if there is
> overloading going on at the same time.  

Thanks for your interesting message.  It reflects a real danger in
cross-language OO development of the kind .NET encourages.  Here's a
lot more on this topic: a site of information by Antoine Beugnard.
You may be surprised by just how much divergence there is!  It
includes an analysis of .NET.

  http://perso-info.enst-bretagne.fr/~beugnard/papiers/lb-sem.shtml
  Comparison of various OO languages relatively to their 
    late-binding semantics [sic]

A briefer paper on this will appear at the Foundations of
Object-Oriented Languages workshop, affiliated with Principles of
Programming Languages, to be held in late-January, 2002, in Portland.

Shriram