Re: Who Wants Ada?

[keith@telesoft.UUCP (Keith Shillington @seventh)]

(Mark Galassi) and (Steve Frysinger) write:
>>> .... This is what the Ada people
>>> need to drive through their skulls: we don't want another COBOL or
>>> Pascal! (No personal offence to "Ada people".)
>>> 
>>> {These views are mine and should be everybody else's :-) }
>Since then Steve has written me a couple of letters, showing that he
>understands that C has more raw power and that the reasons for preferring
>Ada are managerial (large projects with many poeple require
>a language oriented towards tyranny rather than anarchy). This does
>confirm that nobody will program in Ada for the joy of it, but rather
>as a chore. 
> 		... etc.

Growl.  I have been programming in Ada for 4 years now.  Pascal for 6
before that.  C on and off for the entire time.

1:  Ada is NOT Pascal.  It may look similar to the novice, but the
    languages are significantly different.  Just like Pascal looks like C
    to the semi-novice, and we all know the languages are radically
    different.  (...and it certainly isn't COBOL, give me a break!)

2:  Programming in structured, highly typed languages is an incredible
    joy, I don't have to worry about making weird semantic errors; the
    compiler will point them out to me.  I can be highly expressive, and
    have a hope in Hades that someone else might understand my code
    without studying it for weeks.

3:  I agree that C has immense raw power; so do most assemblers.  In
    fact, for writing drivers and the like (given that I don't as of yet
    have a full-on-complete-with-all-the-hooks-and-switches-Ada-Compiler
    to play with) C is the language of choice.  I would counter to the
    claims of C's conciseness with APL.  I would counter to the claims
    of flexibility with LISP.  And I counter to programming joy with
    Ada.

I don't mean to offend, I mean to inform.

Keith Allan Shillington
Instructor in the structured languages: Pascal and Ada.