Re: how expressive are they?

[Scott McKay <address@hidden>]

At 8:47 AM -0500 11/25/02, Sundar Narasimhan wrote:
>  Avoiding code repetition (w/ all the productivity and code
>maintenance advantages that brings) seems to be (to me at least) the
>top contender.

I think that "avoiding code repetition" gets very much
to the bottom of what abstraction is about.  I have always
thought of classes being for data abstraction, generic
functions being for procedural abstraction, and macros
being for control and syntactic abstraction.

I have found all of these kinds of abstraction to be useful.
They all have traps and pitfalls, too.