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From: "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>
Subject: Re: The future of Ada is at risk
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
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References: <20071229040639.f753f982.coolzone@it.dk>
 <agyaras-A5CD14.09451504012008@news.inode.at>
 <87d4sg372q.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> <wcctzlsxpzj.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com>
Date: Sat, 5 Jan 2008 16:36:07 +0100
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Date: 2008-01-05T16:36:07+01:00
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On Sat, 05 Jan 2008 10:16:00 -0500, Robert A Duff wrote:

> Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> writes:
> 
>> Agyaras writes:
>>> 4) Ada limitations. Certain aspects of Ada are painfully clumsy. The
>>> three string libs, unnecessary multitude of I/O libs, primitive
>>> exception handling, constructors are not part of the language,
>>> finalization is an afterthought,....
>>
>> These can be explained with a simple philosophy: if you don't need
>> some feature, then Ada does not force you to pay the price for it.
>> That's why unbounded strings are not the same as simple or bounded
>> strings; that's why finalization is optional.
> 
> Well, it explains why unbounded strings are different from fixed-length
> strings.  It does not explain why unbounded strings use such painful
> syntax.

Right.

> The complaint about exceptions is valid.

Yes, it could be better. Though I don't think that exceptions should of any
type as they are in C++. I would prefer a private type with ordered values
and some mechanism for additional parameters passing, maybe
rendezvous-like.

> I don't understand the complaint about constructors -- Ada 2005 is
> pretty good in this area (better than C++, IMHO).

People complain that there is no user-defined initialization, safe, and for
all types. (Ada.Finalization hack does not count.)

> I'm not sure I understand the finalization issue.

Same as initialization.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de