Re: C is 'better' than Ada because...

[Sandy McPherson <sandy@wgs.estec.esa.nl>]

John F. Bode wrote:
> It *is* a lot harder to shoot yourself in the foot with Ada than it is
> with C, though.

However, when something does go wrong, your whole leg is likely to
disappear!

> 
> C was never designed to write *large* systems; reliance on text-based
> #include files and inability to nest procedures alone is testimony to
> that.
>
>..........
>  
> Since Ada was designed from the outset to solve large-scale system
> problems, it provides the necessary tools, but it takes a while to learn
> to use them effectively.  I reject the notion that "it's just as easy to
> do it in C" -- I've used both, and I will swear on a stack of Gideon
> Bibles that no, it is *not* as easy to do it in C.  Not if you expect the
> goddamn thing to *work* when you're finished.
> 

> John F. Bode
> still working on an appropriate .sig...

It depends upon which type of large system you wish to implement. Ever
tried to write an operating system, or a configurable toolkit, which needs
to use callbacks, in Ada? Yeuch!!! A Motif based GUI? Head for the hills!
In these areas C or C++ wins every time. Whether this is a problem of Ada
as a language is disputable, as these types of systems are traditionally
the stamping ground of C anyway; however as a great believer in making life
easy for myself, I would stick to C/C++ in these areas.

If on the other hand you have a bare chip and need to write a complex
embedded system, (and you have a GOOD Ada compiler), then Ada is probably a
better starting point, because there are so many fetures built into the
language which you have to do manually when coding good C.

The main advantage that C has over Ada is that the compilers are generally
very reliable (because of their small size) and produce efficient machine
code. If you have good PA standards and the correct tools (lint, QAC,
Purify, to name but a few) you can achieve very good results with C,
sometimes better than with Ada. 

The main advantage Ada has over C is its well defined source architecture
and easily employed data abstraction facilities and the tools which are
built into the APSE; these have to be built into a good C program, but a
plonker will bugger this up in Ada as well. Tasking looks like a good idea,
but the implementations can be weak; in fact most spacecraft control
systems I have seen implement their own tasking mechanisms, especially
where they have to respond to hardware interrupts.

Ada should be better than C for most applications, but has certain
weaknesses. Let's see what Ada 95 brings, or shouldn't we all be looking at
Eiffel?

-- 
Sandy McPherson	MBCS CEng.	tel: 	+31 71 565 4288 (w)
ESTEC/WAS
P.O. Box 299
NL-2200AG Noordwijk