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From: Pascal MALAISE <malaise@magic.fr>
Subject: Re: Time to join the fold?
Date: 1999/01/26
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1999-01-26T18:59:06+00:00
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dennison@telepath.com wrote:
> 
> In article <78julr$nd8$1@platane.wanadoo.fr>,
>   "Jean-Pierre Rosen" <rosen.adalog@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> >
> > The ultimate experience for the Ada programmer is to spend two days
> > getting the program through the compiler, but then it works like a
> > charm from the first run on.
> 
> Eww. I hate seeing people put it this way, because it really isn't true. It
> usually only takes me a few minutes to placate the compiler (less if I take
> the intelligent approach and check things every few minutes with the compiler
> while I'm coding). But I almost always have a bug or two in any reasonablly
> complicated algorithm.

I fully agree with you. My point of view is that the level of
abstraction
of the language helps me foccusing on the algorithm and I don't spend
time
and energy thinking of arrays from 0 to N-1, strings of length N but
size N+1,
looking ant man pages for the order of memcpy and bcopy arguments...
(You guessed I program in C as well :-).
This applies when coding, debugging, re-reading, modifying the code, but
doesn't mean that the Ada code does not need to be commented.

On the other hand, the level of abstraction is not too high. I still can
have
the control of the size and performances of the program.
I still can have, if I want, a good idea about how my source is
translated to the
machine code.
I still can interface with C for signals, OS and X calls.

Ada is just the best compromise between abstraction an pragmatism.

-- 
Pascal MALAISE
(priv) mailto:malaise@magic.fr
(prof) mailto:malaise@fr.airsysatm.thomson-csf.com