Re: Comments on Ada vs. C++ panel

[michael.hagerty@nitelog.com (Michael Hagerty)]

DB> Last week there was a panel on Ada vs. C++ in Monterey.  Would anyone
  > who attended post a personal report on comp.lang.ada?

At the risk of offending those who foam up merely thinking of a comparison,
this is my view of what happened at the ASEET panel.

It was very tame, tame indeed.  One of the panelists was on the C++ standards
committee and admittedly was mostly ignorant of Ada-9X.  Hard to fault him
for that; when you are on a standards committee, the whole world begins to
narrow on down.  Nonetheless, he did a creditable job of presenting C++ and
a weak job of highlighting the warts on Ada/Ada-9X.

The criticisms of C++ were mostly of the variety, "C++ would be a really nice
language, IFF you could disable the user's ability to use C."  As most users
already know, this is the big downside to C++.  Unfortunately, the desired
ability to limit the use of C in C++ is not possible and thus the rivalry 
continues unabated.  

The interesting pitch for Ada was centered around the argument that Ada is
a superior language for software engineering as it supports most cleanly
these concepts.  It was interesting, as I said, but the pitch was delivered
only to the choir.

Regards, Mikey (michael.hagerty@nitelog.com)
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