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=-0.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC 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!news4.google.com!news.glorb.com!feed20.multikabel.net!multikabel.net!feed10.multikabel.net!feeder1.cambrium.nl!feed.tweaknews.nl!news.netcologne.de!nhp.netcologne.de!newsfeed.arcor.de!newsspool2.arcor-online.net!news.arcor.de.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Dmitry A. Kazakov" Subject: Re: How come Ada isn't more popular? Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada User-Agent: 40tude_Dialog/2.0.15.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Reply-To: mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de Organization: cbb software GmbH References: <1169531612.200010.153120@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2007 10:14:51 +0100 Message-ID: <1mahvxskejxe1$.tx7bjdqyo2oj$.dlg@40tude.net> NNTP-Posting-Date: 28 Jan 2007 10:14:34 CET NNTP-Posting-Host: 25ebedf2.newsspool3.arcor-online.net X-Trace: DXC=3EUlo\Rn0O_YI9]OHn9o5^McF=Q^Z^V3X4Fo<]lROoRQgUcjd<3m<;RMUZ;RCm1@EZ[6LHn;2LCV^[ On Sun, 28 Jan 2007 00:24:27 +0100, Markus E Leypold wrote: > Charles D Hixson writes: >> It's easier to do simple things in Fortran, C, Pascal, Modula II, PL/I >> or even Snobol. Oh, yes, and BASIC, too. (The other current > > It's easier to do simple things with languages that have lists in > them. E.g. Lisp or Scheme (or Python for today programmers). No, I > disagree: It's not even easy to do simple things in C: Every time I'm > astounded by the contortions I've to go through for anything involving > strings of varying length (OK, I can work in large statically > allocated buffer, but this simply stinks, since it imposes arbitrary > limits). And very soon the wish comes up not to have to write out > specialized list processing code every time for 'list of ints', 'list > of floats', 'list of strings', 'list of lists of strings', 'list of > trees' etc -- and than you start to suffer and it never ends. There is > no way to write generics in C, to fake them or even graft them onto > the language as an afterthought and use a precompiler or a > preprocessor (I'm perhaps exaggerating here, but the pain is there > nonetheless. I've written those things (a generics "expander" for C > :-) and I think/hope I know about what I'm talking here). Generics is a wrong answer and always was. As well as built-in lists you are praising is, because what about trees of strings, trees of lists etc. You cannot build every and each type of containers in. Right answers should be a more powerful type system than Ada presently has. In my view there are three great innovations Ada made, which weren't explored at full: 1. Constrained subtypes (discriminants) 2. Implementation inheritance without values (type N is new T;) 3. Typed classes (T /= T'Class) P.S. All strings have fixed length. It is just so that you might not know the length at some point... (:-)) -- Regards, Dmitry A. Kazakov http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de