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From: Mark Nowiasz; ;  <su0483@sx2.hrz.uni-dortmund.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.beta
Subject: Re: Inconsistency in the Mjoelner implementation?
Date: 15 Feb 1998 21:25:30 GMT
Organization: University of Dortmund
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Peter von der Ahe <pahe@daimi.aau.dk> wrote:

> Most experienced BETA programmers use the knowledge that variables are
> initialized.  This makes it possible to program a lot of patterns
> which don't need to be initialized other than by the defaults.

Yep, I'm using this feature too.

>    L:
>      (#
> 	var: @integer
>      do 
> 	var + 1 -> var;
> 	(if var <> 2 then restart L if)
>      #)

> Its easy to see that it is difficult if not impossible to determine if
> the programmer want "var" initialized on each iteration or not (he
> probably doesn't in this case).

Arg! This piece of code is really ugly and a good example of bad
programming style..the elegant solution would be something like this

(#
   var : @integer
   do
   (L: var + 1 -> var;
       (if var <> 2 then restart L if);
   :L)
#)

which is - apart of being more efficient - much more readable. BTW,
if in the Mjolner system a -> b -> c is a synonym for a -> &b ->c,
does the example above work correctly?

[Objective C]

> I haven't programmed in Objective C, but my guess is that it does not
> support:

> Patterns
> Inner classes
> Concurrency

Nope.. Objective C is a efficient mixture of Ansi C and Smalltalk
(which means usually untyped object references)

> At least not as transparently and easy as BETA does.

Well, I'm not going to a comparison between BETA and C++ resp.
Objective C, since this would include BETA-bashing (;-)), because
I don't think it would be fair to the users of this group to
run a advocacy discussion, but Objective C handles distributed
objects extremely good, which means that it's very easy for
two different objects (i.e programs) to communicate together
in a multitasking environment. Well, I believe that
I'm going to write in the near future a critique about BETA.

Regards,
Mark
-- 
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