Re: [Haskell-cafe] Object Oriented programming for Functional Programmers

Well, probably one of the reasons is that I've learned Eiffel later than Haskell. But really, "Design by Contract" — a theory? It certainly is a useful approach, but it doesn't seem to be a theory, not until we can actually prove something about it, and Eiffel doesn't seem to offer anything in this direction. And by "hack" I meant not the presence of pre/postconditions, but the fact that they don't affect anything else. Strip all of them away, and you'll have the program which is, essentially, the same (and, in fact, pre/postconditions are supposed to be removed in the final version of the program). Compare this to Haskell types, for example: an untyped version of Haskell won't be able to choose between two class instances, so, that would be an entirely different language. On Jan 1, 2013, at 11:41 PM, Mike Meyer wrote:

MigMit wrote:

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Eiffel, for my opinion, is a best OOP language. Meyer use a

On Jan 1, 2013, at 10:23 PM, Никитин Лев wrote: theoretical approach as it is possible in OOP. Really? Because when I studied it I had a very different impression: that behind this language there was no theory at all. And it's only feature I remember that is not present in mainstream languages is it's pre/postconditions system, which looked like an ugly hack for me.

I agree with Leon. Of course, I learned it out of OOSC2, which provides the theory. When compared to "mainstream" OO languages like C++, Java or Python, it's on a much solider theoretical basis. Compared to something like Scheme, Haskell or even Clojure, maybe not so much.

On the other hand, one persons theory is another persons hack. The theory behind the pre/post conditions is "Design by Contract". The contracts are as important as the type signature, and show up in the auto-generated docs in eiffel systems. I found at least one attempt to add DbC features to Haskell. I'm not sold on it as a programming technique - the bugs it uncovers are as likely to be in the pre/post conditions as in the code.

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