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: 103376,463c5796782db6d8
X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public
X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-04-10 07:48:18 PST
Path: 
 archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!cyclone.bc.net!tdsnet-transit!newspeer.tds.net!newspeer.radix.net!uunet!ash.uu.net!spool0901.news.uu.net!spool0900.news.uu.net!reader0901.news.uu.net!not-for-mail
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 10:48:15 -0400
From: Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US;
 rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030302
X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
MIME-Version: 1.0
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: [Spark] Arrays of Strings
References: <slrnb95ehu.ob.lutz@taranis.iks-jena.de>
 <1ec946d1.0304090942.3106b4e4@posting.google.com>
 <slrnb9aagi.p2.lutz@taranis.iks-jena.de>
 <1ec946d1.0304100609.52b0fac0@posting.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <1ec946d1.0304100609.52b0fac0@posting.google.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Organization: KBC Financial Products
Message-ID: <1049986095.779228@master.nyc.kbcfp.com>
Cache-Post-Path: master.nyc.kbcfp.com!unknown@fixedcost.nyc.kbcfp.com
X-Cache: nntpcache 3.0.1 (see http://www.nntpcache.org/)
NNTP-Posting-Host: 204.253.250.10
X-Trace: 1049986096 reader1.ash.ops.us.uu.net 25089 204.253.250.10
Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:36056
Date: 2003-04-10T10:48:15-04:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

Matthew Heaney wrote:
> Doesn't Spark have a #hide clause, to turn off Spark checking?  After
> all, you're calling a C library function, so what difference does
> Spark make?

Getting rid of features that are presumed to cause problems is a bit of
hubris that language designers always seem to fall victim to. Ada itself
had a huge problem because the designers thought that function pointers
could be eliminated. Spark gets rid of all pointers, Java gets rid of
templates, and so on and so on.

Then everyone who uses these languages has to figure out how to work
around the lack of the feature they need, essentially duplicating it in
some kludgy way. Meanwhile the language designers have their heads in the
sand and their noses in the air while they pat themselves on the back (:-)
in self-congratulation on how they have created perfection.