The other day I read an article (or a blog) saying that there
has been an interesting shift from OOP to template-based programming
in C++.
I would to say that template-based programming in ATS has been becoming
the mainstay of programming in ATS in general.
Originally, the template system in ATS was introduced to handle polymorphism
where polymorphic data may be unboxed. This feature has since morphed into
something (in ATS2) that extends far beyond its original purpose. In some
sense,
it can be seen as a disciplined way of doing “copy/paste”. It is a great
feature to
have even if you do not deal with unboxed data at all.
In the following example that can run on Arduino:
the implementation of mysort and myrand (in ListMergeSort.dats) shows a
typical way
of code re-use. What is interesting here is that the list_mergesort
function gets used to sort
(unsurprisingly) and also randomize (somewhat surprisingly) a given linear
list. Note that what
is involved is 100% first-order programming. In particular, there is no
involvement of higher-order
functions and closures.