h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

... isn't OOP referred to as Object-Oriented Programming (i.e. not Orient_AT_ed)? This confused the hell out of me when I went on my first OOP programming language course (SQL Windows if anyone really wants to know) about 4 years ago. Since then I have happily avoided saying "orientated" and have almost certainly made a cost saving of 20% by dropping the, now obsolete, syllable.

zb

Certainly it's "oriented" in all of the references I have on hand. Is this another US English vs. British English thing, or is the Entry mistaken?

Look in your dictionaries..

orient, v.t., 'so as to face', direct towards.
orientate, v.t., orient.

Based upon this, 'orientated' is a perfectly legal English nominal derivation, as is 'oriented', as the above lexemes are functional synonyms.

If one is used more than the other, then of course I stand corrected, but morphologically both are sound.

Grendel BA (Hons) English Language and Linguistics

I have used various different OO languages since about 1989, and it's always been object ORIENTED, not orientated. Dictionaries be blowed. This is one case where I definitely say, 'Go with common usage'.

Obviously orientated is a fully valid (an I suspect much more common) part of speech, and so, grammatically speaking, Object-Oriented Programming = Object-Orientated Programming. I do not question the use of the English language.

I question the fact that an official guide entry refers (specifically) to OOP having the extra syllable which does not appear in the majority of references to OOP that I can find.

Yes this is probably an Americanism (should that be spelt Americanizm?), and therefore us Brits could make a stand and argue that orientated is the more valid use of English, but we wouldn't be reflecting the true use of the phrase "OOP".

I did say I was being a pedant, but I don't think I need to look in my dictionaries

Perhaps I am openly asking to be flamed if I dare suggest Microsoft as a source to back my claim, but some evidence is better than none:

* Your search using "Exact Phrase" for "orientated" returned 19 results.

* Your search using "Exact Phrase" for "oop within orientated" returned 0 results.

* Your search using "Exact Phrase" for "oriented" returned 100 results.

* Your search using "Exact Phrase" for "oop within oriented" returned 97 results.

Taken from:
http://search.microsoft.com/us/SearchMS.asp?so=RECCNT&qu=OOP&qu=OOP&boolean=PHRASE&intCat=0&intCat=1&intCat=2&intCat=3&intCat=4&intCat=5&intCat=6&intCat=7&intCat=8&intCat=9&p=1&nq=NEW&LOC=

(If this large URL turns out to be unfeasible in this forum, then pop over to http://www.microsoft.com and search from there)

Alternative source of defining OOP:
http://www.whatis.com/oop.htm

Do I stand correct?
Thoughts on a postcard, please!

zb

Further data points:

AltaVista
object-oriented 477623 matches
object-orientated 6680 matches

Google
object-oriented 147000
object-orientated 2730

Yawn. Who cares !!

More importantly, which is the best OO language.

I'm a VB5 guy now, and VB5 is not a proper OO language. The original definition said that proper OO languages have inheritance. VB5 doesn't.

That said, VB5 is jolly easy to write because it doesn't have inheritance. Oddly, though it does support PolyMorphism (just).

I thought C++ on Unix stank . Hideous syntax, bloody .c and .h files, no proper development environment ( vi, ls and grep don't count).

I had a dabble with Eiffel, which was much neater than c++, but again lacked a nice development environment.

I imagine things have moved on in the last 2 years. Is there a nice C++/Jave dev environment for Linux ??

"Best" is religious war stuff. My vote is for Self as the _most OO_ language.

Borland's JBuilder is available for Linux. There appears to be a freeoid version of some description downloadable from Borland.
I believe that there's going to be a Linux version of C++Builder too (or maybe I just dreamt that).

Indeed, arguing which languages are OO is definitely religious war territory. VB6 supports aggregation, of course, which lets you do almost everything you can do with inheritance. And who knows what VB7 will bring? Neither the languages nor the definition of OO are cast in stone.

Well I think Java is an excellent OO language. I know there are others that are purer (Smalltalk for example) and I know Java doesn't support multiple inheritance (but that does my head in anyway) but hopefully Java is here to stay. As for C++ - yeeeeuch!

Delphi's my favourite. Object Pascal's a lovely language IMHO. I get on equally well with Java though.

I have to be strange and vote for [incr] tcl / [incr] tk

but that's just me

OK. How do aggregations differ from inheritance?

My UML book says of aggregations:

- Are known as has-a relationship

And of Compositions:

- Are known as contains-a relationships

- Are also known as composite aggregation

Are either of these what a Smalltalk/C++ person would call inheritance?

Delphi's great win was to take VB's means of 'plumbing-in' visual components and recast it into a real OO framework as delegation. This works _so_ much better than having to derive new classes & overriding virtual methods for every component use (see the madness that is MFC). Of course, what happened was that M$ bought Delphi's main architect Anders Hejlsberg (he was rumoured to have gotten a joining fee of $1M), and put delegates into their version of Java, leading (along with JDirect) to Sun suing them, with James Gosling saying that delegation was perfectly good in Java without building special language constructs and instead using inner classes. At least, that's what I remember.

Oddly, when we developed a large Delphi project we found ourselves having had to build our own multicast delegate component. Inevitably, it's rather more heavyweight Delphi's own method-pointers.

I have several books from both IBM and DEC, not to mention a handful or three from 'non-industry-affiliated' publishers who use the term Object Oriented Programming Language. In expanding industry-based acronyms, it's not so much English (or American) linguistics which come into play as remaining true to the Industry Standards.

(So you needn't sully yourself with M$. )

'Nonnie

Now that we're all in agreement that the Entry title is incorrect, I wonder whether there's any chance of getting it fixed?