Re: Death of C (Re: TH)

[bagpiper@pnet02.gryphon.com (Michael Hunter)]

wow...I may understand what you are trying to say but you as much anti-c (at
least in this letter) as Holden is pro-c....maybe a little objectiveness is
needed.
>	Standardization among C compilers can best be shown by the Billions 
>	and Billions of "ifndef"'s and "ifdef"'s in any C program such as 
>	the Emacs Editor source code. 
Just as you are sceaming that Ada is a (relatively) young language,
standardized c is really younger.  If the political smog ever clears ANSI
X3J11 c should be the standard.  A good sign that most of the market is
supporting that is many vendors supporting some or all of the standard before
it is passed.
>>In fact, C++ appears to BE the very language which Ada was supposed to be 
>>(the spirit of the law) but never can and never will be.   
> 
>	Ada was supposed to BE a standard, C and C++ weren't (by design). 
well...to be a snotty asshole, Ada isn't a standard, Mil-STD-1815 is a
standard.  I doubt that Kernighan, Ritchie, or Stroustroup designed C or C++
to not be standardized.  In fact, I would point out that B. Stroustroup
appears to have learned from K & R in the specification of C++ has happeneded
in a more formalized way and that a ANSI effort to standardize it appears to
have been started earlier in its life cycle.  On the other hand, Ada was
designed to be very standarized.  This has some GREAT aspectes.  Unfortunately
flexibility is not one of them.
>>Ada is what you might expect from a programming language designed by 
>>committee;  
> 
>	Again, who is guiding C right now?  Certainly not K & R.
guiding is not designing.....
> 
> 
>>it is unbelievably slow, an unbelievable resource hog, 
> 
>	Sun Microsystems tech reps have told me that they expect Ada can 
>	produce as efficient (if not more efficient) code when Ada 
>	compilers reach the level of maturity as C has. Lets get realistic. 
>	The efficiency of C compilers now are more of a testimonial to 
>	capitalism competitiveness rather than to the language itself. 
yea, once I turn on the pragma to turn off type checking and am very careful
of what types I use.  For some reason I stopped believing tech reps that any
company let me talk to.....The guys in the back room always seem to have
better information? :)  Way back in the beginning the FORTRAN guys said they
could produce code that was bettern the had optimized asm also...ha!
> 
>>.....PC and lots of memory to play with, Ada compilers at least will get 
>>back to you on the same DAY; ................................... 
> 
> 
>	I use Ada on a PC/AT (as do others here) and also use MS C 5.1!  
>	We can't agree with you on this. Try reading the Ada compiler 
>	installation manual. 
not sure what this means, except that judging one Ada compile against one c
compiler seems like an insanely small sample space...
>>......After All". Remember, Ada has been around since 1979.  If that were 
>>the best anybody could say about C after ten years, C compiler salesmen would 
>>be starving and dying like flies. 
> 
>	Your facts are consistently confused. The availability of validated Ada 
>	compilers covering a reasonable selection of machines have only 
>	been around for 4-5 years. 
if I was a judge in a debate I'd laugh at you for this argument....
If it took that long for compilers to show up on the market there must not
have been much market demand?  What are the reasons for this?  Could it be
that Ada compilers are appearing because the military is now enforcing its use
more then it did in '79?  Look closely...you arguement works both ways..
>  
>>.......dollars for.  A far better Pascal compiler is produced by Borland and 
>>can be had at B Dalton's for around $100.  Needless to say, the Rupe- 
> 
>	Careful, you loosing it. Borland doesn't produce their Pascal 
>	compiler. They buy it. And the people they buy it from are presently 
>	working on a TurboAda. Stay tuned for some read benchmarks comparing 
>	C vs Ada. You will find that it is determined more by vendor compiler
>	technology than by the language. 
I could be wrong about this, but I believe that Borland originally bought
their Pascal compiler, but that subsequent development was done by Borland.  I
don't think it was completely a repackage and sale.  It would be cool to see a
TurboAda out on the market built by whoever....but we shouldn't have to wait
from TurboAda to show up to do this.  Hey, net people choose the bench marks. 
A bunch of people from comp.lang.ada write those benchmarks in Ada and get
numbers on their PC's....I (and probably others) will code the same algorithms
in c and we can compare!?
>>A third is an over-emphasis on design, which often leads to grief in the 
>>real-world.......................................... 
> 
>	I wouldn't respond to this with a 10-foot keyboard cable. 
wow...I agree...gotta hate that design phase ya' know ???????????? 
>>      Ada threatens to leave DoD stranded and technologically backwards; 
>>out of the mainstream of American computer science.............. 
> 
>>Ted Holden 
>>HTE 
>	BTW - Your views are so biased toward C and so steadfast 
>	against Ada, that the validity of your letter is taken more as 
>	a joke than informative reading. 
Yea...but you are a little anti-c.  Both Ada and c have very good points.  I
just love the data hiding and data abstraction features of Ada...I really have
to fight c to get some of the same results and C++ is still a little hard to
do real good data abstraction with (generics are only a hack).  On the other
hand the simplicity with witch I can map c to the hardware is great.  I can
see what code is going to be generated for a certain machine...with Ada I just
normally don't have a clue (partially caused by not knowing Ada as long as c).
This would be far more useful conversation if discussion was more candid and
open.  What is good about C++ that is not so good with Ada and vice-versa. 
Somebody that knows C++ very well describe a feature in C++ that is missing in
Ada and lets discuss it.  Maybe the Ada software eng. methodolgy would never
create a piece of code that need that feature....  I don't know...lets just
lose some of the obnoxiosness....

                                                later,
                                                        Michael

Mike Hunter - Box's and CPU's from HELL: iapx80[012]86, PR1ME 50 Series, 1750a
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