Eric C. Wentz

               1-703-860-3807  {evenings before 11 p.m. Eastern}

               CompuServe ID: 72070,1015

               2374 Antiqua Court
               Reston, Va.  22091


General Notes on the Included Archives:

   One of the most important ideas behind OOP is that of code
re-useability.  One important facet of this concept that seems to
be missing in Turbo's OOP extensions is that of Genericity.  To
produce generally useful, re-usable code, it is important to be
able to implement abstract concepts (or datastructures) that are
independent of datatype.  For example, consider the simple
abstract concept of a Stack.  The operations needed for a Stack
are well known to all programmers.  All Stacks implement
Push,Pop,Top,Full,Empty and maybe Depth.  Genericity gives us a
way to define this abstractly, and Inheritance gives us the way
to implement useable Stacks, such as IntStacks, RealStacks,
RecordStacks etc., with minimal extra coding.  In other words, by
defining the abstract concept and utilizing it, we can forget
about the implementation details and achieve yet another useful
layer of abstraction in program design.

   As the designer of the Eiffel programming language, Dr.
   Bertrand Meyer argues, the true strengths of OOP will be
realized by a Bottom-Up approach to programming design (I can
hear the Priests of Top-Down design chanting evil thoughts even
now!).  By designing and implementing low-level, generally
useable Objects, we can avoid constantly reinventing that which
has already been adequately designed and implemented elsewhere.
The true power of OOP will not be realized until such time as
there exists a large body of such Objects from which to draw upon
when coding specific applications.  The included packages are my
(first) contribution to this idea.  I give them to the public
domain in the hopes that others will also undertake to build such
low level, generally