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Python as an Object Oriented Programming Language

Andrew Thompson andrew.thompson at ashecastle.com
Wed Dec 18 07:13:12 EST 2002 
Hey! What's wrong with GOTO ?  Used in a controlled way, it can 
Simplify code, and I am in favour of that.  Python's BREAK statements
Are effectively gotos which get one out of a control-structure, without
having to code up all sorts of weird stuff.

Obviously ad-hoc quick-fix gotos will produce spaghetti, but then
abusing any language feature can do that.  



-----Original Message-----
From: python-list-admin at python.org [mailto:python-list-admin at python.org]
On Behalf Of Hrvoje Nezic
Sent: 18 December 2002 11:42
To: python-list at python.org
Subject: Re: Python as an Object Oriented Programming Language


> 3. Multiple inheritance.
>
> I have read this citation by Zack Urlocker "Multiple Inheritance is 
> the
goto of
> the 90's" and various recommendation against it. On top of that, 
> various languages forbid it by design, because it is a Bad Thing. 
> Nevertheless, it doesn't seem so evil to me in Python, I also have 
> seen a paper by Chuck
Esterbrook
> about Multiple Inheritance and mixins as a very useful technique. I 
> think
the
> original quotation referred to C++ where multiple inheritance is such 
> a
mess.
> OTOH, it doesn't seems very difficult or very dangerous in Python once

> you have understood the Method Resolution Order. Am I correct ? What 
> are the
general
> guidelines of the Python community about multiple inheritance ?

As Mike Meyer said, the problem is not with multiple inheritance itself,
but by bad implementations in some languages. It can introduce
conflicts, and languages have to include mechanisms to resolve them. C++
doesn't have such mechanisms, Python also. Eiffel contains such
mechanisms (and it is a very good language in many other respects). See
www.eiffel.com .

Pure object oriented languages treat basic types like integers, floats,
booleans, string, arrays etc. in the same way as other types. This is
not an academic question, but a very practical issue. For example, in
some languages you must write copy constructors or operator=, just to
copy an object to another one. Imagine writing and maintaning such code
for every class you write. A pure object oriented language has methods
like "clone" that are defined at the top of object hyerarchy and work
for every class, being it integer, array, or any user's class. You get
this functionality automatically.

If you want to write serialization methods, again, in non-pure O-O
langauges you must treat basic types and other types differently, which
means that you'll end up writing lots of unnecessary code.




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