Object Pascal(ID:1170/obj019)Developed jointly by the Clascal team at Apple Computer and Niklaus Wirth. An object-oriented Pascal. Structures: Related languages
References: in Structured Language World 9(3) 1985 view details Object Pascal is an extension to the Pascal language that was developed at Apple in consultation with Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of Pascal. It is descended from an earlier attempt at an object-oriented version of Pascal called Clascal, which was available on the Lisa computer. MacApp itself is descended from the Lisa Toolkit, an application framework for creating Lisa applications. The Lisa Toolkit was written in Clascal. There are actually very few syntactic additions to Pascal in Object Pascal. A new data type is added, the object. An object is very much like a record in that it can have multiple data fields of arbitrary types. In addition, you can specify a list of procedures and functions, referred to as methods, for a particular object type. These methods define the actions that an object of this type can perform. For example, you could define a Shape object type as follows: type Shape = object bounds:Rect; color: Pattern; procedure Draw; procedure Erase; procedure Rotate(angle: integer); procedure Move(delta: Point); function Area: integer; end; Furthermore, you can define an object type that inherits the fields and methods of another object type. The new type can define additional fields and methods and can choose to selectively override methods that it has inherited. type Circle = object(Shape) radius: integer; procedure Draw; override; function Area: integer; override; procedure SetRadius(newRadius: integer); end; var aCircle: Circle; An object type is often referred to as a class. In the above example, Circle is a subclass of Shape. Shape is the superclass of Circle. A class (object type) can have many subclasses (descendants), but only one superclass (immediate ancestor). When speaking of the relationships conceptually , I will more often use the class terminology. When speaking in terms of Pascal data types I use the object type terms. Objects are created by calling the Pascal built-in procedure New on a variable of an object type. You say New(aCircle) to create an instance of the object type Circle. The New procedure, when used with an object type variable allocates sufficient storage on the heap for the object and sets the value of the variable to be a handle (pointer to a pointer) to that data. The double arrow normally required for handle dereferencing is done automatically by the compiler, so fields are accessed directly, eg: aCircle.bounds, NOT aCircle^^.bounds. Likewise, to invoke a method you use the same notation: aCircle.Draw invokes the Draw method of the Circle object type, presumably drawing itself on some display. Since all object type variables are actually handles to the data, an assignment such as shape1 := shape2 causes shape1 to point to the same data as shape2. The fields of an object can themselves be references to other objects. For example you could have a nextShape field in the Shape definition if you wanted to have a linked list of shapes. Object Pascal allows you to specify the type of a field to be a reference to an object type not yet declared. In this manner, you can have circular references of object types to one another. If the compiler encounters an undeclared type identifier, it assumes it is an object type that will be declared later. If the type is not declared later, an error will be reported. The size of the not yet declared object is unimportant since the reference to it is always just a four byte handle. The depth to which an object type can inherit is unlimited. You could define a descendant of Circle and another descendant of that type and so on. Each succeeding descendant inherits all of the fields and methods of all of its ancestors. External link: Online copy in Structured Language World 9(3) 1985 view details |