Re: INFO-ADA Digest V92 #299

[munnari.oz.au!goanna!ok@uunet.uu.net (Richard A. O'Keefe)]

In article <2AAE10C8@ncgate.ccscnet.af.mil>, BUSHMAN@MITECMAIL.CCSCNET.AF.MIL w
rites:
> The problem with is Ada is that it is 
> a very large language ...  There are many other groups out there using
> Ada, but its use is not nearly as common as other languages that you would
> probably be more apt to use in your field (like COBOL, unfortunately).

>  As I stated
> in the last paragraph, Ada is a very large language.  For someone wanting to
> get some programming experience, as your first language to tackle, Ada would
> be much harder to learn than others, such as COBOL.

I recently hunted up all the programming language standards I could find and
read them (our library _still_ hasn't got the C standard I asked for).  It
was illuminating.  COBOL 85 is a very large language and the standard is
ENORMOUS.  Let's keep a sense of perspective here:
	Ada is smaller than COBOL.
	Ada is smaller than C++.
	Ada is smaller than Common Lisp (wow, the draft is _incredibly_ large)
	Ada is larger than C.
	Ada is larger than Pascal.
	Ada is larger than Scheme.
I reckon it's easier to get started with Ada than Pascal.  What counts is
not "how big is the whole language" but "how much do you have to know to
get stuff done".  If it comes to that, I am continually surprised by how
little C many of the C programmers I speak to know, and it's not large.

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