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From: John Whitley <whitley@cse.buffalo.edu>
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Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 13:43:12 -0500 (EST)
To: caml-list@inria.fr
Subject: RE: Looking for a nail
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Don Syme writes:
 > Yes, I'd be interested to see a really convincing use of the
 > utility of the OO features, e.g. a program or library which is
 > manifestly shorter, cleaner and/or simpler when expressed with OO
 > rather than the core features.

Here's an example of something that I would like to be able to do:

If arrays were implemented as a class, then I could subclass them with
something that I was tentatively calling an arrayView class.  The
arrayView is constructed from an existing array, a stride, an offset,
and a length.  The new class only need override the array get and set
element methods, inheriting all remaining operations.  The goal is
that an arrayView can be used by any function/method that requires an
array.

The application that motivated the above idea is a lifting-scheme
based wavelet transform I have written for my research.  This
algorithm requires splitting the input into evens and odds, altering
each even/odd sub-array, then recursing on each sub-array.

The implementation in OCaml (actually, I'm using OLabl) presently
requires that I use a while loop.  (not quite back to Fortran IV,
but...;-) A for-statement with step would clean things up somewhat.
Finally, I think that the ability to create an arrayView class like I
describe would be a useful step for exploring the practice of the OO
and "core Caml" features.

IMHO, languages that support classes but lack a standard class library
aren't really "object-oriented" in an important sense.  In OCaml's
case, I suspect that the lack of a standard library has inhibited
exploration of OO-style in OCaml.

-- John