Subject: Re: CCL: CCL:Object-oriented means for computational chemist

From: "David E. Bernholdt" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 18:08:13 -0400

On Tue, 22 Jul 1997 07:45:08 +0000  "Ping Du" wrote:
> Inheritance is pobably the most important feature of 
> OO design if you would like your program to be extensible and 
> reusable.

I don't entirely agree.  Having done OO _design_ and implemented those
designs in "non-OO" languages, I believe that the other principles of
OO design (abstraction, encapsulation, modularity) are probably more
important and more powerful.  I have not encountered a case where I
felt at a serious disadvantage because the languages I was using did
not support inheritance.

But in any case, I must stress the importance of design.  Looking
back, I think that a thorough design phase probably allowed us to find
the right abstractions so that inheritance was really not an issue,
and we could do what inheritance was required "manually".  It also may
be a property of the problem to some extent (in our case a broad
spectrum of electronic structure methods).
--
David E. Bernholdt                      | Email:  [email-masked]
Northeast Parallel Architectures Center | Phone:  +1 315 443 3857
111 College Place, Syracuse University  | Fax:    +1 315 443 1973
Syracuse, NY 13244-4100                 | URL:    http://www.npac.syr.edu