[MUD-Dev] MUD Design Fundamentals (Was: Looking for

[Jon A. Lambert]

On 31 Aug 97 at 8:39, Ola Fosheim Grostad wrote:
> 
> The major difference however, is in attitudes towards OO among humans,
> not in languages.
> 
> The scandinavian school focus on Object Oriented Analysis.  They focus
> on objects as a mental way for the designer to structure information in
> a manner that is suitable for reasoning and implementation.  Simula was
> (as the name suggests) designed for making programming simulations
> easier. Hopefully programmers write object oriented programs even when
> using ansi-C.
> 
> The american school focused on OO as a manner of extending programming-
> languages with new mechanisms, abstract datatypes etc...
>

FWIW, the current American school does seem to focus on OO Analysis 
and OO Design.  The last two courses I've taken made only passing 
references to languages and that was 3 years ago.  My focus is 
certainly on OO design approaches.  I am designing a mud programming 
language that is OOP enabled, event driven, partially concurrent, 
implicitly persistent and explicitly transactional.

The fact that I learned programming the "old" way has been a 
disadvantage.  I suspect newcomers to programming have the advantage 
of not being forced to discard ingrained programming and design 
practices.

> 
> As far as I can recollect there is at least 3 approaches to OO languages:
> - class based

My language implementation will fall into this general category with 
single inheritence. 

> - cloning based
> - actor based
> 
> I prefer the class based as it better conveys how humans perceive the world.
> It is important to remember that OO is only something typical for the human,
> not something that is typical of the world or the computer.
>

As do I.  In addition, I find class objects very useful.   

Jon A. Lambert