some problems for an introductory python test

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 4:18 AM Hope Rouselle <hrouselle at jevedi.xotimo> wrote:
>
> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:
>
> [...]
>
> >> not disagreeing... and yeah I could have thought deeper about the
> >> answer, but I still think "notthing has been OOP" -> "yes it has, they
> >> just didn't realize it"  was worth mentioning
> >
> > Oh yes, absolutely agree.
>
> At the same time, inside the machine nothing is OOP --- so all the OOP
> is no OOP at all and they just didn't realize it?  This seems to show
> that OOP is about perspective.  An essential thing for OOP is the
> keeping of states.  Closures can keep state, so having procedures as
> first-class values allows us to say we are doing OOP too.  (Arguments of
> procedures are messages and function application is message passing,
> with closures keeping a state --- and all the rest of OOP can be
> implemented with enough such functional technology.)  In summary, OOP
> should not be defined as some special syntax, otherwise there is no OOP
> in ``2 + 2''.
>
> Having said that, I totally agree with all the nitpicking.

Object orientation is a particular abstraction concept. It's not a
feature of the machine, it's a feature of the language that you write
your source code in. I've done OOP using IDL and CORBA, writing my
code in C and able to subclass someone else's code that might have
been written in some other language. [1] Central tenets of OOP
(polymorphism, inheritance, etc) can be implemented at a lower level
using whatever makes sense, but *at the level that you're writing*,
they exist, and are useful.

Data types, variables, control flow, these are all abstractions. But
they're such useful abstractions that we prefer to think that way in
our code. So, *to us*, those are features of our code. To the
computer, of course, they're just text that gets processed into
actually-executable code, but that's not a problem.

So I would say that (in Python) there IS object orientation in "2 +
2", and even in the Python C API, there is object orientation, despite
C not normally being considered an object-oriented language.

ChrisA

[1] And boy oh boy was that good fun. The OS/2 Presentation Manager
had a wealth of power available. Good times, sad that's history now.