A Comparison of Object-Oriented Programming in Four Modern Languages

Object-oriented programming has become a widely-used, important programming paradigm that is supported in many different languages. The paper evaluates Oberon-2, Modula-3, Sather, and Self in the context of object-oriented programming. While each of these programming languages provide support for inheritance, dynamic dispatch, code reuse, and information hiding, they do so in very different ways and with varying levels of efficiency and simplicity. A single application was coded in each language and the experience gained forms the foundation on which the subjective critique is based. By comparing the actual run-times of the language implementations, we also present an objective analysis of the efficiency of current implementations of the languages. The application was also coded in C++, thereby providing a well-known baseline against which the execution times could be compared. 1 Introduction Object-oriented programming has become a widely-used, important programming paradigm that is ..