Re: bitwise comparators

[Alexander Van Hecke <alexke@hotmail.com>]

Mike Silva wrote:

> Since by your tone I think this is a genuine question and not a stinkbomb,

it was a genuine question :-)

>
> here's an off-the-cuff list of Ada features I find "more powerful" than C
> (my primary language):
>
> Strong typing
> Multitasking
> Generics
> Tagged Types
> Packages
> Exceptions
> Discriminants
> Arrays indexed over arbitrary ranges, including enumerations
> Much greater control over variable range and representation
> Runtime error checking

I'm not sure why you think these features are more _powerful_ than in C.  I'd
label these features as more _advanced_.  C is an old language (allthough I'm
not sure at all about Ada), but nearly all those things you sum up are
_possible_ in C, maybe they're not as easy as in Ada and require the programmer
to explicitly program them (which may take a lot of code), but they're
possible.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to make Ada look bad here, but I think my
previous statement stands : suppose you have no previous programming experience
whatsoever, I think that C is a lot easier to learn than Ada is.  I'd say that
Ada is a more advanced language (i.e. has more advanced features), as there are
many languages that are more advanced than C.

Again, I'm not trying to start a heavy discussion here about C versus Ada.  I
was just wondering what you all thought about it.  I want to emphasize here
that my experience with Ada is _very_ limited (and probably will stay that way,
I'm using it now for an exercise I have to make - I'm a final year student
computer science).  I must admit, I was curious about the possibilities of Ada
:-)

greetings,
alex