From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,604e0f87aa06eab6 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-03-14 10:17:13 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!headwall.stanford.edu!newsfeed.utk.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!nycmny1-snh1.gtei.net!news.gtei.net!hermes.visi.com!news-out.visi.com!petbe.visi.com!uunet!ash.uu.net!spool0901.news.uu.net!spool0900.news.uu.net!reader0901.news.uu.net!not-for-mail Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 13:17:10 -0500 From: Hyman Rosen User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030313 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Organization: KBC Financial Products Message-ID: <1047665830.579605@master.nyc.kbcfp.com> Cache-Post-Path: master.nyc.kbcfp.com!unknown@nightcrawler.nyc.kbcfp.com X-Cache: nntpcache 3.0.1 (see http://www.nntpcache.org/) NNTP-Posting-Host: 204.253.250.10 X-Trace: 1047665831 reader1.ash.ops.us.uu.net 24008 204.253.250.10 Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:35337 Date: 2003-03-14T13:17:10-05:00 List-Id: Robert C. Leif wrote: > Microsoft is imitating Ada generics in its proposed next version of C#. On the referenced page, they lie and dissemble about C++ templates. You are right about them imitating Ada generics, although I don't see anything like generic formal pacakges which Ada uses to great effect. They are not imitating C++'s template specialization abilities, so they will lack any template metaprogramming capability. It seems clear to me that in both the Java and C# cases, generics are being added as an afterthought by people who don't really understand them. > Microsoft is now explaining what is wrong with Java. That's rather like me "explaining" what's wrong with Ada. > This again demonstrates that those who switched from Ada to Java > did not do it for good technological reasons. Were there that many people who did this? Anyway, perhaps there were enough good technological reasons to switch that the lack of generics was outweighed.