Hacker News Reader

Comment by mistrial9 | Hacker News Reader

The concept of abstract data type is a real idea in the days of compiler design. You might as well say "compiler design predates object oriented programming". The technique described in the lead is used to implement object-oriented programming structures, just as it says. So are lots of compiler design features under the hood.

source- I wrote a windowing framework for MacOS using this pattern and others, in C with MetroWerks at the time.

View on HN

Compiler design does predate object oriented programming. The first compiler was made by John Backus et al at IBM in April 1957.

As for abstract data types, they originated in Lisp, which also predates object oriented programming.

Actually, no.

"AN ALGORITHMIC THEORY OF LANGUAGE", 1962

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0296998.pdf

In this paper they are known as plexes, eventually ML and CLU will show similar approaches as well.

Only much latter would Lisps evolve from plain lists and cons cells.

You caused me to do some digging. That publication is dated November 1962. The Lisp 1.5 manual’s preface is dated August 17, 1962, which is even older. It describes lambdas and property lists, which seem like they can be used to implement ADTs, although I do not have a Lisp 1.5 interpreter since those are obsolete, so I cannot verify that. Computer history articles claim that Simula, the first object oriented language, was born in May 1962, but was not actually operational until January 1965:

https://history-computer.com/software/simula-guide/

Thus, while I had thought Lisp had ADT concepts before the first OOL existed, now I am not sure. My remark that they originated in Lisp had been said with the intention that I was talking about the first language to have it. The idea that the concept had been described outside of an actual language is tangential to what I had intended to say, which is news to me. Thanks for the link.

Plexes are first mentioned in 1960

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/366199.366256

and the paper even starts with a critique of the efficiency of Lisp's approach for representing data with cons pairs (citing McCarthy's paper from the same year).

You might also want to watch Casey's great talk on the history of OOP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI

Reply on news.ycombinator.com