Re: From extended Pascals to Ada 95 guide

[Gautier <gautier.demontmollin@maths.unine.ch>]

> >> When I had to design a new language, I would add it I think, because it
> >> seems nice. But to change to another language (... ADA..) for it?

Marin:

> >Well, not just for that one feature. Just remember that if you like
> >Pascal you'd likely feel very much at home with Ada.

Marco:

> I do. But to program apps, not to create academical perfect programs.
> I also think portability issues are often severely overrated.

It depends on your needs. When you have to maintain a large commercial
program that must run on NT for some customers, on Linux for others
it's perfectly feasible in Ada (real case). Try just to manage accurately
file I/O in a portable way in Pascal, even details like 'what happens when
such file is not there ?'. Not to make the hot-line explode...

Another important thing: you should have the choice between compilers, even
when your program already has more than 100'000 lines. E.g. switch from
a compiler firm A (which suddenly closed down, stopped development,
begins to procude a unusable bloatware, has too expensive support or
doesn't provide optimization or a Linux version) to firm B or C.

> >Ada is kind of like
> >"Pascal++" in that the syntax is very much like Pascal's, but it cures
> >certain ills that existed there and then added a *lot* more stuff to
> >make the language much more powerful.

> Over standard pascal, or over Delphi?

Anyway, a lot over BP7. I find even Ada 83 (current is 95) with its
generics (templates), polymorphism, overloadable operators, subtypes
a quantum leap for programming numerics (here on an Alpha server) compared
to BP7...

I would be glad to incorporate some details about Delphi in my comparison...

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Gautier  --  http://members.xoom.com/gdemont/gsoft.htm