Re: point by point advantages of Ada

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

Wes Groleau wrote:
> by a large number of enthusiastic users throwing in every
> 'kitchen-sink' feature that suited their fancy.

Or by a bunch of people asking Bjarne Stroustrup to add features.

>> To a certain extent, the compiler writers have been waiting for code that
>> would teach them the language. .....
> 
> In other words, they have job openings in quality control
 > --and the formal title of the open position is "customer."

It's not exactly a quality control problem. C++ has a number of nooks
and crannies where some very esoteric stuff has to be implemented by the
compiler. It takes a very close reading of the standard to figure some
of these out, so without code that tries to use these features, it's
possible for compiler writers to not even know that they exist.

One big problem is that the C++ standardization process did not result
in a rationale. It's likely that a lot of examples were discussed during
the standardization process, but then were not made available for
implementors to see.