Re: Safe C++

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On Thu, 20 Sep 2001, Pat Rogers wrote:
> "Brian Rogoff" <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> wrote in message
> news:20010919202331.R6489-100000@shell5.ba.best.com...
> > On Wed, 19 Sep 2001, Chad R. Meiners wrote:
> > > "Brian Rogoff" <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> wrote in message
> > > > Pattern matching
> > > > Parametrically polymorphic functions
> > > > Tuples
> > >
> > > I'll have to trust you or these three since I have never encountered a
> > > situation where I was ever wishing for such functionality.
> >
> > I used and liked Ada, compared with C, but there aren't too many things
> > about Ada (overloading is the big one) I miss compared with ML.
>
> What is the concurrency support?

That's another one (mostly) for Ada. OCaml has a decent threads library,
and SML/NJ supports a Concurrent ML extension (there's a book by that name
too which you can read) and has Scheme style call/cc. I don't know much
about the other SMLs.

I certainly wasn't knocking Ada, I'm pointing out that there are core
language extensions which would (IMO of course) make Ada a much better
language. Some of those extensions are being tried in Cyclone. One of the
goals of Cyclone no doubt is to become successful, so they are starting
from C, rather than Ada. I think it's unfortunate that there aren't such
projects for Ada. Personally, I think pattern matching on algebraic data
types is one of the biggest advantages of modern languages, since that
feature combines brevity, readability, and typability, and is very much in
the spirit of Ada. Much more so than tagged types and OO!

-- Brian