Re: Ada 9X objectives

[sakkinen@tukki.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen)]

In article <16192@vail.ICO.ISC.COM> rcd@ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn) writes:
>William Wolfe writes about Ada 9X and C++
>
>>    There are a lot of negative things in C++, [...]
>[...]
>[Wolfe finishing up on importance of multiple inheritance]
>>    By incorporating this mechanism into Ada, the sole argument for C++
>>    becomes the unwillingness of C/C++ programmers to give up their
>>    hacking ways, and this is a problem we can successfully address.
>
>This is flawed in several ways.  The first is the attitude that C/C++
>programmers have "hacking ways" somehow tied to the language, and that they
>can be corrected by setting them on the One True Path to Ada.  Look, this
>is arrogant on the part of Ada folks and demeaning toward the C/C++ folks.
>[...]
>Also, the argument that you can just add multiple inheritance and win the
>battle is based on the assumption that C++ is now static, that it's not
>going to acquire any more useful features.  I suspect strongly that this is
>a mistaken assumption.[...]

The main problem of C++ is not that it would not have lots of good features
(especially the newest release, 2.0). The problem is that it has such
fundamental _bad_ features that will have no chance ever to go away:
they should have been pruned in the first step from C to C++.
Things like the pointer arithmetic certainly invite if not oblige
C and C++ programmers to "hacking ways", or perhaps they invite
hacker-style programmers to use these languages instead of more
disciplined ones.

Several other comments in Mr. Dunn's posting made sense, though.

Markku Sakkinen
Department of Computer Science
University of Jyvaskyla (a's with umlauts)
Seminaarinkatu 15
SF-40100 Jyvaskyla (umlauts again)
Finland