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by PaulHoule 700 days ago
+1 for use of the word "Reification"!

There's another universe of object-adjacent systems that may or may not be connected with conventional OO programming languages. Two examples I'd point to are Microsoft's COM (designed so it is straightforward to write and call COM objects from C) and the "objects" in IBM's OS/400. In both of those cases I think the reification is the important thing, although you can see reification in Java's object headers where objects get a number of attributes necessary for garbage collection, concurrency control, etc.
1 comments
smackeyacky 700 days ago
COM dates back to a time when OO languages were uncommon but the techniques were being used in C.

I worked on a system back then that had “objects” that was based heavily around function pointers.

When we first got hold of the cfront C++ pre processor it did much the same thing but automated all the kludges we had for compile time checking.

So I wouldn’t really class something like COM as object adjacent, it was more “proto” OO

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