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From: Ralph Paul <Ralph.Paul@ibm.net>
Subject: Re: Papers saying Ada as an overly complex language and hard to
 implement
Date: 1998/02/16
Message-ID: <34E8C060.54D3@ibm.net>#1/1
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References: <34E7B551.115C289F@cs.utexas.edu> <dewar.887600858@merv>
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1998-02-16T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Yongxiang Gao wrote:
> 
> Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> >  These five aspects are not only different, but mutually incompatible. For
> > example, these days, it is generally perceived that languages need to
> > be fairly feature rich (Ada 95, C++, Fortran 90, OO COBOL, ...) to be
> > simple to use. Even Java is pretty feature rich, especially if you include
> > its standard libraries.
> 
> For a beginner, "rich" comes with "complex to use".
That's simply not true. Just because a language such as Ada offers
you many feature for many different application areas, it doesn't have
to be complex. If you restrict yourself at the beginning to a subset of
the complete 
language you will see that Ada is really not that complex. Actually many
things are done in a more reasonable way than in C/C++ for example.
If you know Pascal or Modula-2, you should not have much trouble to 
get used to Ada. If you come from a Fortran-77 prespective then there
might be quite a few new things to learn but that's not different for 
C/C++, Java, Oberon-2, Python, Eiffel, ..... .


> 
> >  As for "hard to write a compiler for", Ada is no more difficult than
> > any of these other languages. These days the really hard part of any compiler
> > is doing a good job of optimizing the object code on modern
> > architectures, and this is about the same effort for any language.
> 
> Who tells you "Ada is no more difficult than any of these other languages"?
> Do you know the stories of Ada implementation in the early 80's?

Do you know those stories ? Alot of that seems to be of the urban legend
type : people that have heard from other people that have heard .....

I think Robert Dewar should be in a position to talk about early Ada
implementation ( see www.gnat.com or cs.nyu.edu: lool for Ada-Ed (:-)
or check www.dejanews.com for Robert's Name (;-)).
 
> >  So I don't know if you can find the papers you are looking for, or what
> > you need them for, but papers that meet your criteria are likely to be
> > bogus.
> >
> > (if they exist:-)
> 
> You're welcome to offer more constructive information.

You're the one making the claim. Not the comp.lang.ada
So where is your story (;-).

Regards,


Ralph Paul

	Ralph.Paul@ibm.net