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=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,21960280f1d61e84 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!s48g2000cws.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: "kevin cline" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: How come Ada isn't more popular? Date: 24 Jan 2007 16:22:38 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <1169684558.876074.40530@s48g2000cws.googlegroups.com> References: <1169531612.200010.153120@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1169588206.234714.312650@k78g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1169624573.534128.172610@s48g2000cws.googlegroups.com> <3CLth.75328$wP1.8787@newssvr14.news.prodigy.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: 208.8.57.2 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Trace: posting.google.com 1169684564 13549 127.0.0.1 (25 Jan 2007 00:22:44 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2007 00:22:44 +0000 (UTC) In-Reply-To: <3CLth.75328$wP1.8787@newssvr14.news.prodigy.net> User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.9) Gecko/20061206 Firefox/1.5.0.9,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) X-HTTP-Via: 1.1 ics_server.swacorp.com (ICS 2.3.0.0.16) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: s48g2000cws.googlegroups.com; posting-host=208.8.57.2; posting-account=Thx6EwwAAAAirqf96i7UdETSL0vfyj5f Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:8524 Date: 2007-01-24T16:22:38-08:00 List-Id: On Jan 24, 10:14 am, wrote: > "kevin cline" wrote in message > > > Yes, I've read that article. It would really be sad if Ada were not > > superior to C for a toy problem in embedded control system development, > > since Ada was designed specifically for that purpose. But the point > > was that expressiveness drives programmers to new languages, and Ada > > isn't particularly expressive.It depends on what you want to express. Expressiveness, like beauty, > is often "in the eye of the beholder." For many software professionals, > the absence of curly-braces makes a language less expressive. For > others, their presence is a problem. For some, brevity is a sign of > expressiveness. For others, ease of understanding on the part of a > reader is important to expressiveness. > > I do know a lot of languages, including many in the C family. I have > programmed in COBOL, Fortran, PL/I, BASIC, Python, and many > others. I teach a class in comparative programming languages. > > An important distinction to be made is expressibility versus expressiveness. > The fact that I can express a solution in Fortran that is better suited to being > expressed in COBOL does not mean that Fortran is expressive. When > a solution is possible, that makes it expressible. When the language is > designed to express such solutions, that makes it expressive -- for that > kind of problem. > > Languages evolve to become more expressive. Fortran has evolved. COBOL > has evolved. Ada has evolved. Even Java continues to evolve. Some languages > seem not to evolve and remain stagnent. PL/I comes to mind. Some programmers > do not evolve, and they also become out-of-date. > > As languages evolve some tend to get better at being more directly expressiveof > a larger range of solutions. Not all languages evolve well. In my view, C++ > has not become better with its most recent "improvements." > > Ada is expressive of a large number of solutions that are more difficult to > express in C or other languages. However, the base language is not as > expressive as Perl for regular expressions. That has required a separate > library unit. It is not as directly expressive of mathematical solutions as > Fortran. That too requires library units. All the fundamental constructs > are in place to create powerful library units. Not as powerful as I would like, and definitely not as powerful as C++ templates. Christopher Grein demonstrated this conclusively in his paper on modeling scientific units in Ada. C++ templates allow the straightforward construction of a compile-time safe system of physical units, allowing arbitrary computations, while Ada's explicit instantiation model forced one to rely on run-time checking.