From: Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Papers saying Ada as an overly complex language and hard to implement
Date: 1998/02/20
Date: 1998-02-20T00:00:00+00:00 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <34ED802F.7D16003C@cl.cam.ac.uk> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 34EC6ED2.15FB@hso.link.com
Stanley R. Allen wrote:
> Since Dr. Lin is a professor who publishes papers concerning
> his own favorite language (ZPL), I would guess that the real
> reason for the literature request is so that he can put line
> like this into some new paper he is writing:
>
> "ZPL is relatively easy to implement and use. It is
> well-documented that Ada is overly complex with
> numerous problems [4,7, 9, 12]."
>
> And so the assertion would be "proved" by the references.
The suitability of a language for a large scale industrial
software engineering project depends a lot on how widely
the language is available, what support is available and how
many people are familiar with it. I would say it is fair to claim
that only the following languages enjoy really wide industry
support at the moment:
C, C++, Fortran, Cobol, Ada, Java.
Of those, C, Fortran, and Cobol are clearly far behind the
state of the art in programming language design. C++, Ada, and
Java are the only modern programming languages that are well
enough supported today to justify a long-term investment into
them (and I'm not even sure whether this is true yet for Java).
C++ is popular because its backward compatibility with C and
and it is also well known for its complexity and pitfalls and
its unsuitability for safety critical development.
Under this view, comparing experimental academic languages
like ZPL with a widely supported production language like Ada95
would be highly misleading.
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Security Group, Computer Lab, Cambridge University, UK
email: mkuhn at acm.org, home page: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
next prev parent reply other threads:[~1998-02-20 0:00 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 53+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
1998-02-15 0:00 Papers saying Ada as an overly complex language and hard to implement Yongxiang Gao
1998-02-15 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1998-02-16 0:00 ` Yongxiang Gao
1998-02-16 0:00 ` Ralph Paul
1998-02-16 0:00 ` Brian Rogoff
1998-02-16 0:00 ` Jon S Anthony
1998-02-16 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1998-02-16 0:00 ` Yongxiang Gao
1998-02-17 0:00 ` Simon Wright
1998-02-18 0:00 ` Yongxiang Gao
1998-02-18 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1998-02-18 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1998-02-19 0:00 ` Stanley R. Allen
1998-02-20 0:00 ` Markus Kuhn [this message]
1998-02-18 0:00 ` Stanley R. Allen
1998-03-05 0:00 ` Robert I. Eachus
1998-02-17 0:00 ` Joe Gwinn
1998-02-17 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1998-02-18 0:00 ` vonhend
1998-02-18 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1998-02-18 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1998-02-22 0:00 ` Simon Wright
1998-02-18 0:00 ` Larry Kilgallen
1998-02-18 0:00 ` Larry Kilgallen
1998-02-17 0:00 ` Dan Moran
1998-02-18 0:00 ` Joe Gwinn
1998-02-17 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1998-02-18 0:00 ` Yongxiang Gao
1998-02-19 0:00 ` John English
1998-02-22 0:00 ` Luis Espinal
1998-02-22 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1998-02-23 0:00 ` Nick Roberts
1998-02-24 0:00 ` Jonas Nygren
1998-02-24 0:00 ` Larry Kilgallen
1998-02-25 0:00 ` Nick Roberts
1998-02-25 0:00 ` Keith Thompson
1998-02-20 0:00 ` Markus Kuhn
1998-02-20 0:00 ` Laurent Guerby
1998-03-03 0:00 ` Matthew Heaney
1998-03-03 0:00 ` Stanley R. Allen
1998-02-19 0:00 ` Ada's complexity Steve Furlong
1998-02-20 0:00 ` Markus Kuhn
1998-02-16 0:00 ` Papers saying Ada as an overly complex language and hard to implement Brian Rogoff
1998-02-16 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1998-02-16 0:00 ` Brian Rogoff
1998-02-17 0:00 ` Andi Kleen
1998-02-17 0:00 ` Brian Rogoff
1998-02-17 0:00 ` Geert Bosch
1998-02-19 0:00 ` Parsing Ada and C++ Steve Furlong
1998-02-16 0:00 ` Papers saying Ada as an overly complex language and hard to implement nabbasi
1998-02-16 0:00 ` Yongxiang Gao
1998-02-16 0:00 ` nabbasi
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
1998-02-18 0:00 Marin David Condic, 561.796.8997, M/S 731-96
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