In article <········································@ziplip.com>,
·······@ziplip.com <·······@ziplip.com> wrote:
>Before OOP, were classes part of Lisp? Just wondering.
No. Classes are a feature of OOP.
--
Barry Margolin, ··············@level3.com
Level(3), Woburn, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.
Barry Margolin wrote:
> In article <········································@ziplip.com>,
> ·······@ziplip.com <·······@ziplip.com> wrote:
>
>>Before OOP, were classes part of Lisp? Just wondering.
>
>
> No. Classes are a feature of OOP.
Of course, "Before OOP" means "before some time in the 1960s"...
paul
In article <········································@ziplip.com>,
········@ziplip.com" <·······@ziplip.com> wrote:
> Before OOP, were classes part of Lisp? Just wondering.
This is hard to answer in general, because this depends on how you
define OOP. You have specificially asked for classes - however, what
most mainstream languages offer in that regard does not go beyond the
basic functionality already provided by defstruct in Common Lisp.
If you the rest of CLOS into account, like generic functions etc.,
things become more complicated because I don't know a lot of other
languages that provide as much flexibility. On the other hand, in a
certain sense, you can also see property lists as a kind of very
rudimentary OOP mechanism, and they were available in the very first
Lisp implementations AFAIK.
Instead of starting to wonder what OOP is all about, I would recommend
to take a look at the history of Lisp and get a sense of how far ahead
of its time Lisp has always been, and still is. There is a lot of
material about the history of Lisp out there in the web. The HyperSpec
has a short section at http://www.lispworks.com/reference/HyperSpec/Body/01_ab.htm .
The history of Lisp from the beginning in the 1950's to ca. 1978 is
described by John McCarthy at http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp.html . The history from then on up to the beginning of the 90's is described
by Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel at http://www.dreamsongs.com/Essays.html (you can find it somewhere on that page).
If you are interested in the history of CLOS, you might find some
information in CLtL2.
Pascal