Re: Inheritance and Ada

[cox@ppi.UUCP (Brad Cox)]

In article <19902@linus.UUCP>, sdl@linus.UUCP (Steven D. Litvintchouk) writes:
> 
> Ada does *not* provide direct support for subclassing/inheritance in
> the style of Smalltalk, Flavors, etc.  (And yes, I have found this to
> be a major limitation of Ada.)
> 
This is to thank Steve for his wonderfully clear explanation of Ada's
limitations as an object-oriented language, and to flame at bit at those
who are willing to live with those limitations rather than fixing them.

Ada also doesn't provide regular expression notation for writing lexical
analyzers, nor a BNF notation handy for writing parsers.

C doesn't provide these things either. But C lives in a culture that 
encourages its users to fix such limitations for example by providing 
preprocessors like lex and yacc. 

Ada lives in a culture that ruthlessly exterminates any thought of building
and using such tools.  THIS IS WRONG! DREADFULLY WRONG! DONT PUT UP WITH IT!

C also doesn't support object-oriented encapsulation and inheritance, but
we've fixed that with a tool that does, Objective-C.

I recently received a paper about a similar tool for Ada, InnovAda, to
be presented at the Technology Strategies conference. Call me or send
mail and I'll put you in touch with the author.
-- 
	Brad J. Cox; VP and Chief Technical Officer
	Productivity Products International
	75 Glen Road; Sandy Hook, CT 06482
	(203) 426 1875; ...yale!bunker!ppi!cox