Oops It's Happening

Abstract

Since the introduction of computers, programmers have been searching for higher level languages which support a philosophy of quick and easy application development and maintenance. Problems in the 50's and 60's resulted in extensions being added to computer languages to make them more modular, thus reducing the problems of having different parts of a program conflict with each other. This module or block of code required protection from other things happening within the program and introduced the concept of an OBJECT and how to protect (encapsulate) data used by that object. One of the first oriented languages was Smalltalk, developed at Xerox PARC in 1977 by Alan Kay. It was a tremendous success at influencing the direction of many commercial products like Apple's Lisa and Macintosh. Similar to the Macintosh, the Smalltalk system is not just a language; it's an integrated programming environment. An object oriented programming (OOP) environment like Smalltalk is based on a single universal data structure (the object), a control structure for sending messages, and a uniform class description (the class hierarchy).

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 31, 1989
Accession Number
ADA220498

Entities

People

  • Mel Fisher

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Application Software
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Languages
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Environment
  • Hierarchies
  • Information Systems
  • Language
  • Maintenance
  • Object Oriented Programming
  • Operating Systems
  • Smalltalk Programming Language
  • Software Development
  • Software Development Tools

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Military History of the United States in the 20th Century.