Re: Suggestions to a Newbie

["Marin D. Condic" <mcondic-nospam@acm.org>]

Preben Randhol wrote:
> Hrmf, I just made a small Ada program to format text to be sent as SMS
> to my celluar phone. It probably could have been done in perl, but it
> took me less time to do it in Ada and it worked right away :-)
> 
Oh, all right. I'll confess to hacking in Ada too. I have a large
collection of tools hanging around on the disk and I'm so familiar with
all of them that I can usually pull together a quickie app to parse some
text file or fix something in a database faster in Ada than I might in
some other scripting language with which I had less familiarity.

But when I used to spend lots of time on VMS, I could slap together a
DCL job that would accomplish fairly sophisticated kinds of things much
more easily than I could hack an Ada program of similar function.
Depends on the problem space. Lots of file manipulation and OS
interaction? DCL would be easier. Of course, there was no problem
building a DCL job that could run Ada hacks in it when Ada did it
easier. :-)

Too bad VMS is fading into the background - withering in the shade cast
by the various flavors of Unix. (I'm a hard core VMS bigot!) Maybe
Compaq ought to make the source public and maybe someone could make a
Linux-like thing out of it?

MDC
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