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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,411186037d1bc912 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Dave Jones Subject: Re: Some questions about Ada. Date: 1996/05/02 Message-ID: <3188F63D.3325@io.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 152614661 references: cc: davedave@io.com content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii organization: PSI Public Usenet Link mime-version: 1.0 newsgroups: comp.lang.ada x-mailer: Mozilla 2.01 (Win16; I) Date: 1996-05-02T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Carl Laurence Gonsalves wrote: > I've got a couple of questions about Ada. I have to confess that I've never > written a single line of Ada code. I've got experience in C, C++, Modula-3, > Java, and Scheme, and several other languages. I've recently become > interested in finding out about Ada, partly because I've noticed that both > Java and Modula-3 seem to have been influenced by Ada's design, and I think > both languages are very good. > My opinion: Ada95 is the best all-around language for software engineering. C++ is awful. Nevertheless, if I were starting a project today, I would probably choose to use C++. Why?: More (and better and cheaper) tools are available for C++, more programmers are trained to program in C++, et cetera. > One thing I'm wondering about is packages. I've heard that packages are > "better" than than the way C++ uses classes. I'm curious as to why this is. > Modula-3 has modules (which are similar, AFAIK, to Ada's packages) and > "object types" (classes) as two distinct entities. I'v always thought that > C++'s way of allowing just about anything to be nested in a class much > cleaner and simpler. (and for the record, I was programming in Modula-3 > before I was programming in C++) So are packages better? Why? > I would not say that packages are necessarily better. They are, however, easier to read and maintain than C++ classes. (Of course, if you switched from a well- designed language like Modula-3 to C++, maintainability and ease of reading are probably secondary concerns for you.) By the way, Ada95 is fully object oriented, so you can create classes (But be careful: Ada uses different terms for its object-oriented constructs than other languages do.). > Second, I've been wondering why Ada is case-insensitive. I'm aware that Ada > was very carefully designed, so I'm thinking there must be some reason it > was made case-insensitive rather than case-sensitive, but I can't imagine > what that reason could be. > This was done on purpose. Although it gives the programmer less flexibility, it does make for more reliable programs: If you have ever tried to maintain a C program where This and tHIS do not mean the same thing, you know what I mean. -- Dave Jones davedave@io.com