Does the FILE type used through standard C functions fopen, etc. have an object-oriented interface?
I'm looking for opinions with reasoning rather than an absolute answer, as definitions of OO vary by who you ask. What are the important OO concepts it meets or doesn't meet?
In response to JustJeff's comment below, I am not asking whether C is an OO language, nor whether C (easily or not) allows OO programming. (Isn't that a separate issue?)
Is C an object-oriented language?
Was OOP (object-oriented-programming) anything more than a laboratory concept when C and FILE were created?
Answering these questions will answer your question.
EDIT:
Further thoughts:
Object Oriented specifically means several behaviors, including:
Inheritence: Can you derive new classes from FILE?
Polymorphism: Can you treat derived classes as FILEs?
Encapsulation: Can you put a FILE inside another object?
Methods & Properties: Does a FILE have methods and properties specific to it? (eg.
myFile.Name, myFile.Size, myFile.Delete())
Although there are well known C "tricks" to accomplish something resembling each of these behaviors, this is not built in to FILE, and is not the original intent.
I conclude that FILE is not Object Oriented.
If the FILE type were "object oriented", presumably we could derive from it in some meaningful way. I've never seen a convincing instance of such a derivation.
Lets say I have new hardware abstraction, a bit like a socket, called a wormhole. Can I derive from FILE (or socket) to implement it. Not really - I've probably got to make some changes to tables in the OS kernel. This is not what I call object orientation
But this whole issue comes down to semantics in the end. Some people insist that anything that uses a jump-table is object oriented, and IBM have always claimed that their AS/400 boxes are object-oriented, through & through.
For those of you that want to dip into the pit of madness and stupidity that is the USENET comp.object newsgroup, this topic was discussed quite exhaustively there a few years ago, albeit by mad and stupid people. If you want to trawl those depths, the Google Groups interface is a good place to start.
Academically speaking, certainly the actual files are objects. They have attributes and you can perform actions on them. Doesn't mean FILE is a class, just saying, there are degrees of OO-ness to think about.
The trouble with trying to say that the stdio FILE interface qualifies as OO, however, is that the stdio FILE interface doesn't represent the 'objectness' of the file very well. You could use FILEs under plain old C in an OO way, but of course you forfeit the syntactic clarity afforded by Java or C++.
It should probably further be added that while you can't generate 'inheritance' from FILE, this further disqualifies it as OO, but you could argue that's more a fault of its environment (plain C) than the abstract idea of the file-as-object itself.
In fact .. you could probably make a case for FILE being something like a java interface. In the linux world, you can operate almost any kind of I/O device through the open/close/read/write/ioctl calls; the FILE functions are just covers on top of those; therefore in FILE you have something like an abstract class that defines the basic operations (open/read/etc) on an 'abstact i/o device', leaving it up to the various sorts of derived types to flesh those out with type-specific behavior.
Granted, it's very hard to see the OO in a pile of C code, and very easy to break the abstractions, which is why the actual OO languages are so much more popular these days.
It depends. How do you define an "object-oriented interface"? As the comments to abelenky's post shows, it is easy to construct an argument that FILE is object-oriented. It depends on what you mean by "object-oriented". It doesn't have any member methods. But it does have functions specific to it.
It can not be derived from in the "conventional" sense, but it does seem to be polymorphic. Behind a FILE pointer, the implementation can vary widely. It may be a file, it may be a buffer in memory, it may be a socket or the standard output.
Is it encapsulated? Well, it is essentially implemented as a pointer. There is no access to the implementation details of where the file is located, or even the name of the file, unless you call the proper API functions on it. That sounds encapsulated to me.
The answer is basically whatever you want it to be. If you don't want FILE to be object-oriented, then define "object-oriented" in a way that FILE can't fulfill.
C has the first half of object orientated.
Encapsulation, ie you can have compound types like FILE* or structs but you can't inherit from them which is the second (although less important) half
No. C is not an object-oriented language.
I know that's an "absolute answer," which you didn't want, but I'm afraid it's the only answer. The reasoning is that C is not object-oriented, so no part of it can have an "object-oriented interface".
Clarification:
In my opinion, true object-orientation involves method dispatch through subtype polymorphism. If a language lacks this, it is not object-oriented.
Object-orientation is not a "technique" like GTK. It is a language feature. If the language lacks the feature, it is not object-oriented.
If object-orientation were merely a technique, then nearly every language could be called object-oriented, and the term would cease to have any real meaning.
There are different definitions of oo around. The one I find most useful is the following (inspired by Alan Kay):
objects hold state (ie references to other objects)
objects receive (and process) messages
processing a message may result in
messages beeing sent to the object itself or other objects
a change in the object's state
This means you can program in an object-oriented way in any imperative programming language - even assembler. A purely functional language has no state variables, which makes oo impossible or at least awkward to implement (remember: LISP is not pure!); the same should go for purely declarative languages.
In C, message passing in most often implemented as function calls with a pointer to a struct holding the object's state as first argument, which is the case for the file handling api. Still, C as a language can't be classified as oo as it doesn't have syntactic support for this style of programming.
Also, some other definitions of oo include things like class-based inheritance (so what about prototypal languages?) and encapsulation - which aren't really essential in my opinion - but some of them can be implemented in C with some pointer- and casting magic.
Related
I am implementing a lisp interpreter in C, i have implemented along with few primitives like cons , car, cdr , eq, basic arithmetic stuff.
Just before i was starting to implement define and lambda it occurred to me that i need to implement an environment. I am unsure if i could implement it in lisp itself.
My intent is to implement minimal amount of lisp so that i could write extension to the language in itself. I am not sure how much is minimal, Would implementing FFI Qualify as minimal ?
The answer to your question depends on the meaning that you give to the word “minimal”.
Given your question, and assuming that you don't want to make an implementation competing with the nowdays fine implementations of Common Lisp and Schema, my hypothesis is that with “minimal” you intend: Turing complete, that is capable of expressing any computation expressible in a general purpose programming language.
With this assumption, you need to implement three other things:
conditional forms (cond)
lambda expressions (lambda)
a way of defining recursive lambda expression (labels or defun)
Your interpreter then should be able to evaluate forms. This should be sufficient to have a language equivalent to the initial LISP, that allow to express in the language any computable function.
First off, you are talking about first writing a LISP interpreter. You have a lot of choices to take when it comes to scoping, LISP1 vs LISP2 since these questions alter the implementation core. An interpreter is a general purpose program that reads and evaluates code. It can support abstractions but it won't extend itself by making more native stuff.
If you are interested in such stuff you can perhaps make a compiler instead. Eg. there are many Sceme like subsets that compiles to C or Java code, but you can make your own VM. Thus it can indeed compile itself to be run on it's own target machine (self hosting) if all the forms and procedures you use has been implemented using the primitives supported by the compiler.
Making a dumb compiler is not much difference from making an interpreter. That is very clear if yo've watched the SICP videos (10A is about compilation, 7A-B is about interpreters)
The environment can be a chain of pairs just as in a LISP interpreter. It would be difficult to implement the environment of itself in LISP without making it a very difficult Lisp language to use (unless it's compiled that is)
You may use the data structures of lisp and the primitives from the C code though.
Making a FFI is a fast way to give your language lots of features. It solves the chicken and egg problem by using other peoples work from within your language. In fuses the top (primitives and syntax) and the bottom layer (a runtime) of your system. It's the ultimate primitive and you can think of it as system call or message bus to the runtime.
I strongly suggest to read Queinnec's book: Lisp In Small Pieces. It is a book dedicated entirely to answer your question, and it explains in detail the many trade-offs and the internals of Lisp implementations and definitions, by giving many explained examples of Lisp interpreters and compilers.
You might also consider using libffi. You could be interested in the internals of M.Serrano's Bigloo & Hop implementations. You might even look inside my MELT lisp-like language to customize the GCC
compiler.
You also need to learn more about garbage collection (you might read the GC handbook). You could use Boehm's conservative Garbage Collector (or something else, e.g. my Qish or MPS) or write your own GC.
You may want to learn more about Chicken, Scheme 48, Guile and read their papers and look inside their code.
See also J.Pitrat's blog: it is not about Lisp (but about bootstrapping strong AI) and has several fascinating entries related to bootstrapping.
I am planning to develop an application in C. My programming experience has always been with object oriented languages. Hence I always think in terms of classes, interfaces, inheritance, polymorphism, etc, when designing an application.
All the C books I've looked at deal with how to program in C or focus on a particular topic, I couldn't find any that talk about application architecture in C. So how do you structure a C application when the OOP features are not available? How do you keep everything modular and well organized and avoid code duplication (no OOP seems like there will be alot of code duplication)?
Edit:
I am not looking for answers on 'how to write OOP code in C'. I am looking for the standard practice way of structuring C applications so they are modular and well organized. If the standard practice way is to hack on some OOP features then that is fair enough but if its not then there is no point in telling me to go down that route.
It is a different way of thinking. The core philosophy of C can be summarised as:
data + algorithms = programs
So to design an application in C:
You need to think carefully about what the data is, and define structs which reflect that well, and facilitate the relationships between different views on the data.
You need to think about what algorhythms are going to operate on what data, and what data they produce. This helps to clarify the structs you should have, and help to show what should be blocked together to create reusable blocks of code.
One way of moving to this approach from an OOP approach is to imagine that one struct + one .c file = a class, and to put in the .h file the struct definition and the externally accessible functions (public methods).
You have to write a lot of code to do boring things like memory allocation and freeing and all that jazz. It's not as bad as it sounds, but factor this into your design.
you can design your C project as oriented object project and then replace the class by structure. this was recommended to me in this topic and in this topic
Also, to create re-usable C software, read this book by David R. Hanson
https://sites.google.com/site/cinterfacesimplementations/
Basic OOP is best done with the techniques mentioned in Alex Schriner's OOC.pdf book
First you will identify the components and their interactions to solve the problem.
then inside each component, below practices can be used.
Design the public functions first.
design the data structure ( i.e struct ) the functions are going to work
Modify the public functions to take the corresponding structure as pointer argument. [ There is no instance variable concept in c. you need to define a structure and pass structure between functions ] .
group the functions with related data structure in a header file.
provide the implementations to the public functions in a separate c file which includes the header file you defined.
make all your private/helper methods as static, so they will not be visible to other c files.
Since there is no namespace concept in C, Ensure your public functions are not conflicted with existing library functions. some people are using name mangling like {short name of header file}_{function name}
allocating and release the memory is the developers responsibility. it is better to have initialize and free functions to allocate and clear the memory along with the public functions designed.
Follow the coding styles you are comfortable with.
Design each components as shared library , so that you don't need to compile them every time.
It is possible to practice TDD with C, see C programming and TDD .
If you're used to practicing TDD, you know it will help you keep your code well organized and modular.
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Can you write object oriented code in C?
Object oriented programming in C
So, as I get it, "objects" are basically just wrappers for values and methods. Can't you have the same functionality in C, with structs? A struct seems just like a simple class, but, of course, it doesn't have any methods. Here we get to the heart of my problem: I don't understand why methods are needed at all. Wouldn't it be simpler and more memory-efficient if we had an outside function, which just accepted a pointer to an instance of a struct? Or even have the structs have pointers to these functions, but this seems purely aesthetic...
Being object-oriented means being object-oriented out of the box. Sure you can simulate object orientation with C (and with many other non-OO languages), but if the language (and/or its standard library) does not help you with that in any way (special syntax, standard objects, etc) and does not encourage to write in OO style by default, it will not be called object-oriented.
Using c-style function pointers as struct members, you can indeed make C object oriented.
I like the concept of having a class with its attributes and methods all defined together. Its easier to see what the related entities are, as opposed to having separate functions that take pointers to the struct like you mention.
Here are 2 related SO questions:
Is there a simple way to code the strategy (or other) design pattern in ANSI C that would fit on the screen of an 11" MacBook Air?
How do function pointers in C work?
What you suggest is already used to implement OO features in C. But many people find easier to use dedicated languages where OO features are included.
This is the same trend as why people switched to C from assembly.
Object is real-world entity and it has state, behavior. In class(c++/java) we can define state as member variables and functions as behavior. In case of C: in struct, you may have state but not behavior. Therefore C is not object oriented. This is just a small e.g. Also C does not support OOPS principals like inheritance, function overloading, polymorphism etc.
I have been doing OOP (C++/Java/PHP/Ruby) for a long time and really have a hard time imagining how large programs and libraries such as Linux or Apache can be written entirely in an imperative style. What would be small open source C projects I could look at to get a feel of how things are done in C?
Bonus points if the project is hosted on GitHub.
Things are done exactly the same way in C, but with less overt support from the language. Instead of creating a class to encapsulate some state, you create a struct. Instead of creating class members, with implicit this parameters, you create functions that you explicitly pass a struct* as the first parameter, that then operate on the struct.
To ensure that encapsulation is not broken you can declare the struct in a header, but only define it in the .c file where it is used. Virtual functions require more work - but again, its just a case of putting function pointers in the struct. Which is actually more convenient in C than C++ because in C you get to fill in your vtables manually, getting quite a fine level of control over which part of code implements part of what COM interface (if you are into COM in C of course).
You might find the ccan (Comprehensive C Archive Network, modeled after Perl's CPAN) interesting.
It's small at the moment, but the contributions are of high quality. Many of the contributions are by linux kernel developers.
Almost everything in there falls into the "few thousand LOC" or less category, too.
If you want a small example to start with, try looking at the source for the basic Linux CLI utilities. GNU binutils, make, or any of the other GNU utilities have full source code available and are relatively small code bases (some are larger than others). The easiest thing is usually to start with a utility that you have used before and are already familiar with.
Look at GLib for an almost canonical example of how to do object oriented programming in C.
Having learned Java and C++, I've learned the OO-way. I want to embark on a fairly ambitious project but I want to do it in C. I know how to break problems down into classes and how to turn them into class hierarchies. I know how to abstract functionality into abstract classes and interfaces. I'm even somewhat proficient at using polymorphism in an effective way.
The problem is that when I'm presented with a problem, I only way I know how to do it is in an Object-Oriented way. I've become too dependent on Object-Oriented design philosophies and methodologies.
I want to learn how to think in a strictly procedural way. How do I do things in a world that lacks classes, interfaces, polymorphism, function overloading, constructors, etc.
How do you represent complex concepts using only non-object-oriented structs? How do you get around a lack of function overloading? What are some tip and tricks for thinking in a procedural way?
The procedural way is to, on one side, have your data structures, and, on the other, your algorithms. Then you take your data structures and pass them to your algorithms. Without encapsulation, it takes a somewhat higher amount of discipline to do this and if you increase the abstraction level to make it easier to do it right, you're doing a considerable part of OO in C.
I think you have a good plan. Doing things the completely OO way in C, while quite possible, is enough of a pain that you would soon drop it anyway. (Don't fight the language.)
If you want a philosophical statement on mapping the OO way to the C way, in part it happens by pushing object creation up one level. A module can still implement its object as a black box, and you can still use reasonable programming style, but basically its too much of a pain to really hide the object, so the caller allocates it and passes it down, rather than the module allocating it and returning it back up. You usually punt on getters and setters, or implement them as macros.
Consider also that all of those abstractions you mentioned are a relatively thin layer on top of ordinary structs, so you aren't really very far away from what you want to do. It just isn't packaged quite as nicely.
The C toolkit consists of functions, function pointers and macros. Function pointers can be used to emulate polymorphism.
You are taking the reverse trip old C programmers did for learning OO.
Even before c++ was a standart OO techniquis were used in C.
They included defining structs with a pointer to srtuct (usually called this...)
Then defining pointer functions in the struct, and during runtime initialize those pointers to the relevant functions.
All those functions received as first paremeter the struct pointer this.
Don't think C in the complete OOP way. If you have to use C, you should learn procedural programming. Doing this would not take more time than learning how to realize all the OOP features in C. Furthermore, basic encapsulation is probably fine, but a lot of other OOP features come with overhead on performance when you mimic them (not when the language is designed to support OOP). The overhead may be huge if you strictly follow the C++ design methodology to represent every small things as objects. Programming languages have specific purposes in design. When you break the boundary, you always have to pay something as the cost.
Don't think you have to shelve your knowledge of object-oriented work - you can "program into the language".
I had to work in C after being primarily experienced in object-oriented work. C allows for some level of object concepts to pull through. At the job, I had to implement a red-black tree in C, for use in a sweep-line algorithm to find the intersection points in a set of segments. Since the algorithm used different comparison functions, I ended up using function pointers to achieve the same effect as lambdas in Scheme or delegates in C#. It worked well, and also allowed the balanced tree to be reusable.
The other feature of the balanced tree was using void pointers to store arbitrary data. Again, void and function pointers in C are a pain (if you don't know their ins and outs), but they can be used to approximate creating a generic data structure.
One final note: use the right tool for the job. If you want to use C simply to master procedural technique, then choose a problem that is well-suited to a procedural approach. I didn't have a choice in the matter (legacy application written in C, and people demand the world and refuse to enter the 21st century), so I had to be creative. C is great for low/medium abstractions from the machine, say if you wanted to write a command-line packet inspection program.
The standard way to do polymorphic behavior in C is to use function pointers. You'll find a lot of C APIs (such as the standard qsort(3) and bsearch(3)) take function pointers as parameters; some non-standard ones such as qsort_r take a function pointer and a context pointer (thunk in this case) which serves no purpose other than to be passed back to the callback function. The context pointer functions exactly like the this pointer in object-oriented languages, when dealing with function objects (e.g. functors).
See also:
Can you write object-oriented code in C?
Object-Orientation in C
Try not to use OOP in C. But if you need to, use structures. For the functions,
take a structure for an argument, like so:
typedef struct{
int age;
char* name;
char* dialog;
} Human;
void make_dialog(Human human){
char* dialog="Hi";
human.dialog=dialog;
}
which works exactly like python's self, or something like that and to access other functions belonging to that class:
void get_dialog(Human human){
make_dialog(human);
printf(human.dialog);
}