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: 10261c,cfbb90c56a313e70 X-Google-Attributes: gid10261c,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,cfbb90c56a313e70 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Al Christians Subject: Re: From extended Pascals to Ada 95 guide Date: 2000/08/27 Message-ID: <39A991F3.A8D8BED7@easystreet.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 663252241 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <8o3s2a$9ph$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <8o4bfq$v0h$1@slb7.atl.mindspring.net> <8obv01$7hu1@news.cis.okstate.edu> X-Accept-Language: en Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Complaints-To: newsabuse@supernews.com Organization: Trillium Resources Corporation MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.pascal.misc Date: 2000-08-27T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: David Starner wrote: > > Okay, why isn't Ada a "Wirth-style language", if Modula-3 is? They > share more in common with each other than either does with Wirth's > Pascal, for instance. > The principal criterium is size of the language definition/reference manual. Modula-3's is under 60 pages, IIRC, much smaller than Ada's. And Wirth was some kind of advisor to the M3 design team. M2 and M3 are both very nice languages if you want something simpler than Ada and don't need what they leave out. But neither one shows much sign of life. If you wish you had more mainstream/affordable commercial support for Ada, the situation is about ten times worse working with either M2 or M3. All three of these languages, M2, M3, and Ada, now support generics, and that gives them a big advantage over Delphi for coding without doing aribtrary conversions between data types. In Delphi, the generic type stored by the standard VCL collection classes is the Pointer, and the program must cast it to whatever type it really represents. One big reason Borland's Pascal became popular was because it let you go around Pascal's strict type checking, but that was years ago, and it's regrettable to have to routinely write code that will be checked for correctness at run time when there are less worrisome alternatives. I don't believe that Wirth's versions of M2 or Pascal allowed any way to go around the type system, and in M3, the modules that might do so must be marked as unsafe. Ada does allow unchecked conversions. Al