thmpsn....@gmail.com wrote: > More interestingly, though, most compilers translate C and C++ code to > assembler first. Does that mean that you can do object-oriented > programming, generic programming, and procedural programming in > assembler? > > Answer: No, but you can probably -- very clumsily -- fake them.)
This is getting quite far off the topic, but of course you can, and it's not faking anything. This should be obvious. You can certainly do OO programming in C, which is a glorified assembler. For example, the gobject system defines a complete object-oriented system with classes, inheritance, polymorphism, encapuslation. It uses structures for encapsulating the data and call tables for virtual methods (to use a c++ parlance). It's such a well defined object model that you can, with gtkmm, even extend a c-based gobject class with C++! Of course you can also extend gobject-based C classes with python as well using PyBank to import them. Back when assembly was still somewhat in vogue I read a book on programming assembly in an object-oriented manner. So of course you can. Yes it can be clumsy without syntactic sugar. If you set up call tables, you can handle polymorphism. How would this be faking it? By your definition C++ is faking it since C++ compiles to assembly. In the early days, C++ was first implemented as a preprocessor that emitted straight C code. And I guess python fakes it since the python interpreter is implemented in C compiled to ASM. Maybe the terminology would be less confusing if we considered the terms, object-oriented programming, object-oriented languages, object-oriented systems. Any language can be used for the first. Python, Java, C++ can be defined by the second, and things like Python (the runtime environment), .NET, JVM, Parrot, can be defined by the last term. Fair enough? Python is certainly an object-oriented language, and implements a complete object-oriented system. Python can support coding in an object-oriented methodology, or you can code traditionally while still taking advantage of the complete OO system. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
