Object-Oriented Lisp and OCaml
Posted by Daniel Lyons Fri, 07 Sep 2007 19:12:00 GMT
I have a theory about the respective OO capabilities of Lisp and OCaml, but I’m not quite sure who to ask.
In Lisp, when you make some class and some methods, those methods look like regular functions. In fact, in a sense, they are regular functions which happen to have more than one definition depending on the types of their parameters. So functional-style programming isn’t hampered.
I’m wondering to what extent functional and OO programming styles intermingle in Lisp and OCaml. My suspicion is that OCaml suffers from a lower degree of functional/OO integration because it provides object#method syntax instead of method object syntax which would be analogous to its function call syntax and closer to Lisp’s (method object) syntax.
I wouldn’t worry too much about syntactic differences. OO is rarely used in OCaml simply because the language provides other forms of encapsulation and abstraction that are typically preferable (faster, better static checking and more succinct).