Re: Software Architecture/Design

> Tom Plunket wrote:
>>
>> Anyway- this is a very strange discussion to me, having been steeped
>> in writing OO code in C, since obviously "the data knows nothing" and
>> all of the transformations were functions that took an "object" and
>> did some operation with it.

Alex Lindsay wrote:
>
> It seems to me that at least part of this discussion, and in particular, the
> performance benefits, come from not writing functions that take an object
> and do an operation, but writing a function that takes a pile of objects and
> performing the same operation on all of them.

Yes, I think that is the case.

> If that means warping these ideas to fit the mindset of a 'traditional OO
> C++ programmer' i.e. someone who writes classes representing single objects,
> then maybe we should be telling them "hey, instead of making 'class Car',
> make 'class Cars' and keep all cars in there. Write member functions that
> act on all the internal cars and maybe return new instances of Cars." to
> shove them in the right direction, a direction currently dictated by slow
> memory and multiple CPU opportunities.

The amazing thing to me is how similar ideas lead to such vastly
different implementations across programmers.  My bent would be to
avoid creating a class Cars, and instead just have a Car array; that
way I /could/ access an individual item if/when I wanted or needed to,
but by default process the array in one go (for things like the update
function).

-tom!

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