Re: Does Ada95 beat FORTRAN?!?

["Theodore E. Dennison" <dennison@escmail.orl.mmc.com>]

Kenneth Mays wrote:
> 
> I was interested in replacing a lot of old Fortran-77 code with Ada
> code. Does anyone feel that Ada95 is
> better than FORTRAN? Should we replace this old programming language
> with a better one? Should we
> RETRAIN the thinking processes of our MBA students that FORTRAN (that
> great formula translator of 1977) should
> be maintained but not used for future development?
> 
> From what we have have seen of Ada95, does it measure up?

Frankly, as someone who was introduced to Fortran-77 before C, Pacscal, 
and Ada, I'm not sure what Fortran-77 DOES measure up to. I hated it
from the start.

Fortran-77 code MAY be faster than Ada code, but in my book that really
doen't make up for the lack of support for dynamic-allocation, strong
typing, exception handling, concurrency support, generics....

And lets not forget that syntax that only makes sense to folks who
have used it for 30 years (or to computing history buffs).

Most of the arguments I hear in favor of Fortran these days were 
heard in favor of Assembly (against Fortran) 30 years ago. 

To be fair though, I do know of someone here who feels quite strongly
the other way. If I have time, I'll try to get him to post a response
(of course, I'll have to teach him how to use a newsreader first. ;-) ).

-- 
T.E.D.          
                |  Work - mailto:dennison@escmail.orl.mmc.com  |
                |  Home - mailto:dennison@iag.net              |
                |  URL  - http://www.iag.net/~dennison         |