On Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:15:51 +1200, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote: > In message <mailman.4178.1240170419.11746.python-l...@python.org>, > Christian Heimes wrote: > >> Neither Java nor Python are pure object oriented languages. > > That's like saying the Soviet Union was never a pure communist country, > or that the US is not a pure capitalist country. "Pure", it seems, can > be endlessly redefined to exclude any example you might care to name, > that you don't happen to like.
> In short, it's a meaningless adjective. Not in the least. There's an accepted definition for "objected oriented programming language": a language which provides "objects", which are constructs encapsulating both data and routines to operate on that data in a single item. A "pure" OO language is clearly a language where *everything* is performed using OO techniques on objects. That's in contrast to impure OO languages like Java, which exposes ints and floats as machine primitives, and Python, which allows and encourages non-OO techniques. Purity in object-orientivity is not necessarily a good thing. In fact, we don't even need to know what a "pure" OO language is to know that Python isn't one. All we need is one feature that all reasonable people agree isn't OO, and we know that Python isn't pure OO. Since Python includes such functional tools as map() and reduce(), and there is no such collection.map() method, we know that Python isn't purely OO. Waiting-for-somebody-to-claim-that-map(alist)-is-object-oriented-ly y'rs, -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
