[snip description of paper that compares C++ versus Pascal or C]A paper finding that OOP can lead to more buggy software is at http://www.leshatton.org/IEEE_Soft_98a.html
What papers have scientific evidence for OOP?
That's of course a good question. I'm sure also that comp.object has argued about this a thousand times. I'll just note that one paper is just a single data point with specific circumstances. The OO languages under investigation might have caused increased or lower failure rates for other reasons than their (lack of) object-orientedness, for instance. It is of course possible to come up with a lot of other explanations for a single data point besides a conclusion that OOP can lead to more buggy software. It for instance certainly not surprising to me that C++ can lead to more buggy software than some other languages. :)
[snip]
If OOP is so beneficial for large projects, why are the Linux kernel, the interpreters for Perl and Python, and most compilers I know written in C rather than C++?
Because C++ is not an ideal object oriented language? Because a Linux kernel has very stringent predictability requirements for what kind of machine code is generated that C meets and is much harder to do with C++? There are other reasons to choose C, such as portability, obiquity and performance.
Some of the same reasons probably apply to Perl and Python, though at a lesser degrees. I do not know a lot about Perl's implementation. I do know that Guido van Rossum has in fact considered rewriting Python in C++ in the past. And right now, there are various projects that are using object oriented languages to reimplement Python, including Python itself.
Finally, it is certainly possible to program in object oriented style in C. It is more cumbersome than in a language that supports it natively, but it is certainly possible. Such OO in C patterns occur throughout the Linux kernel, which needs a pluggability architecture for its various types of drivers. It can also be seen in many aspects of Python's implementation. Another example of a C-based system that uses object oriented technologies is the GTK+ widget set.
Anyway, this question is using a few data points to make an overly generic argument, and the data points themselves do not really support the argument so very well either.
Regards,
Martijn -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
