On 10/07/17 3:19 PM, Anthony Clayden wrote:
As a native speaker of an SVO language (English) in a country where one of the official languages is VSO (Māori), I sometimes find the OVS structure of "mainstream OO languages" a little uncomfortable... "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind."
lol. That's a cute comparison.
I don't think "mainstream OO" is OVS. In:
... button.colour <- red
This is normally written button.setColour(red) object verb something Maybe it's OV without a subject, object vp[+imperative]
Gloss: 'button's colour goes red'.
`button's colour` is the grammatical Subject. (Yes it represents an OOP 'Object.method', but that's because everything in OOP is an 'Object'; and the only way to access is by methods.)
Yes, but there is no law in OOP that the object has to be first. In Ada, I could perfectly well write Set_Colour(Red, Some_Object); and have it dispatch on the 2nd argument. In Common Lisp, I could perfectly well write (set-colour 'red some-object) and have it dispatch on the 2nd argument (or indeed, have it dispatch on more than one argument). The object.selector(arguments) syntax is a generalisation of record.field syntax, and there's no law requiring that either. Algol 68 used field OF object. OOP really isn't about the *syntax*, any more than FP is. That's only a human usability issue. (Only. Heh.)
This dot-suffixing is already in Haskell: Data.ByteString.Lazy.Builder.Extras 'Data's ByteString's Lazy's Builder's Extras'.
That is "path" syntax, which again older languages would have written Extras in Builder in Lazy in ByteString in Data and none of the components resembles a verb, in the way that method selectors do.
But the outcry against TDNR's proposal for dot really was vociferous.
Because the dot already has too many uses. There are at least three forms of overloading: - ad hoc, as found in PL/I, Fortran, Algol 68, Ada, and Java. - parametric, as found in ML, Clean, F#, Haskell, and others. - type-based, as found in Eiffel and Haskell, say. Fitting all three together is tricky.