Re: Ada OO Mechanism

[Dan Nagle <dnagle@erols.com>]

Hello,

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
<snip requoted >

> I think this probably also applies to the "first language" theory of
> programming and explains why lots of programmers accustomed to Fortran
> had such hostility towards Ada. 

Well, my first language (after assembler) was Fortran, and I'm finding
Ada to be one of the most attractive languages around.

I think both Fortran and Ada are high level languages designed for
a particular pupose(s) and which are both very pratical languages
for programming.  Both exhibit a high degree of awareness of and
sympathy to optimization issues, and generally with issues of
what's going on under-the-hood.

> My first language was Pascal and I found
> Ada to be quite comfortable, albeit substantially larger. I did quite a
> bit of Fortran programming, but always keeping in mind Pascal's flow
> structures, etc., which resulted in much more reliable and easier to
> understand Fortran code. Yet people I knew who had dealt strictly with
> Fortran found it difficult to deal with things like defining variables
> before they used them, lack of common blocks, etc.

Again, my experiences are different.  I've always found Fortran
programmers treated COMMONs as just another kind of data declared
in the main program.

I believe the Fortran standards committee is looking at Ada as they
work out how OO will appear in Fortran.

> Programming in a new
> language definitely requires that you give up your preconceived notions
> of how something "ought" to look.

Agreed.  What's interesting to me is how different folks can program
in the same language and come away with such different viewpoints.
To me, Pascal has always been baby-Fortran with a lot of restrictive
rules (and the unspoken claim that following the rules meant you'd
never make a logic error!).

<snip sig>

-- 

Cheers!
Dan Nagle		dnagle@erols.com
Purple Sage Computing Solutions, Inc.