Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
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From: philo@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Phil Odor)
Subject: Choice of OOP for Scheme
Message-ID: <philo-2301951744090001@mac-h164e.cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
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Organization: CALL Centre, Univ. of Edinburgh
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 1995 17:44:09 GMT
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I'd appreciate some advice on how to choose an OOP extension to Scheme.
I've been working in SmallTalk for a while (though I'm no expert), and now
face moving our development to Scheme. As a newcomer, I find the number of
flavours of object system a bit bewildering. Many seem to be flowering, so
I presume that they each address different design issues, but what these
are is not clear to someone who wasn't around when they were being argued
through. The FAQ helps to identify what is on offer, but doesn't
distinguish between them either by design philosophy, or usefulness in
particular situations.

So: I wonder if I could be a fly on the wall to a thread about OOP
extensions for Scheme? I'd be glad to hear those in the know discuss what
the main design dimensions are, what tradeoffs are involved, say something
about attitudes (for instance, towards method encapsulation), and comment
on the appropriateness of the various systems for different tasks.

Alternatively, if there are already good comparative papers on this topic,
I'd be grateful if you could steer me towards them.

(For the record, we are trying to build fast fuzzy parsers for multiple,
interlinked, concurrent sequences of fuzzy events. In the current system
our users specify the concurrent grammars representing the subsequences of
interest, and we use their formal specification to build an object net of
partial recognisers: we then let this loose on the event stream. 

But I'd like to understand the OOP extensions design issues in a broader
context, not just as it might bear on our particular problem ).

Thanks in advance.

Phil

-- 
Phil Odor, CALL Centre, University of Edinburgh
4 Buccleuch Place             Tel +44 31 650 4282
Edinburgh                     Fax +44 31 668 3285
Scotland EH8 9LW            email philo@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
