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,ca0b11ae1c9a00cb X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Markus Kuhn Subject: Re: Papers saying Ada as an overly complex language and hard to implement Date: 1998/02/20 Message-ID: <34ED802F.7D16003C@cl.cam.ac.uk>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 326920422 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <34E7B551.115C289F@cs.utexas.edu> <34E8AA02.7ED447E0@cs.utexas.edu> <34E91572.CE9CEED2@cs.utexas.edu> <34EB6579.C791152D@cs.utexas.edu> <34EC6ED2.15FB@hso.link.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Organization: Cambridge University, Computer Laboratory Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-02-20T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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: