On Tuesday, May 19, 2015 at 10:44:10 AM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Tuesday 19 May 2015 12:20, Rustom Mody wrote: > > > I must say I am impressed by C#/.Net for making the value/object > > distinction first-class all the way from language to VM. > > I'm not sure what you mean by that.
Neither am I <wink> [Dont know too much about that environment] > Are you referring to something similar > to Java's distinction between native/unboxed types versus objects and boxed > values? Yes except that it seems to be more core to C# than to Java (or python): https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/s1ax56ch.aspx And then this distinction goes all the way down to the CLR [in ways that I am not very clear about] eg http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=30608&seqNum=3 > Apart from the possible efficiency gains, what benefit do you see from > distinguishing between "values which are objects" versus "values which are > not objects"? As I said, in the context of a low level language its probably a bit of a misnomer However conceptually/pedagogically making a fundamenal distinction of timeless | time value | object immutable | mutable expression | statement function | procedure is key to getting programming [and is something that Pascal got better than most of its successors]. The FPers want to squeeze the whole world into column 1 The OOPers want to do the opposite and are embarrassed by the existence of column-1 [status of int in java etc] Unless one is committed to some philosophical extreme position -- Only One True Way -- I believe accepting two fundamentals is the most sane choice -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
