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: 103376,66bc6b039f1e005d X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Tucker Taft Subject: Re: Three simple questions Date: 2000/10/11 Message-ID: <39E47530.EB5FE94B@averstar.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 680150140 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <2BED68CA963D6D55.A78776F656DA0452.75A61ED22116F1B6@lp.airnews.net> X-Accept-Language: en Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Complaints-To: usenet@inmet2.burl.averstar.com X-Trace: inmet2.burl.averstar.com 971273520 11207 141.199.8.77 (11 Oct 2000 14:12:00 GMT) Organization: AverStar (formerly Intermetrics) Burlington, MA USA Mime-Version: 1.0 NNTP-Posting-Date: 11 Oct 2000 14:12:00 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 2000-10-11T14:12:00+00:00 List-Id: [NOTE: as you can see from the number of responses, there is no such thing as a "simple" question about a programming language...] Frank Christiny wrote: > > Friends, > > Having arrived recently into the green Adian world, I am trying to > assimilate all there is to know about this powerful, unfairly > maligned computer language. Most questions I have been able to > answer from the FAQs here and there but there are three (so far) that > have gone unanswered: > > 1. What is the correct pronunciation of Dr. Ichbiah's name? > Is the "ch" pronounced as in "Loch" or as in "each"? Is the > final "h" is silent? Eesh-bee-uh is how I pronounce it. Jean will have to give his own official version. By the way, at one of the early Ada conferences, someone claimed that "Ichbiah" was Swedish for "iceberg" and that is why 90% of the complexity of Ada 83 was hidden below the surface. Of course, with Ada 95 we tried to raise the iceberg a bit, and maybe even smooth off a few of those dangerous irregularities. > > 2. What is the rationale for case-insensitivity in the language? > I am beginning to think it is mostly for historical reasons > (some machines didn't have two case letters way back then, etc.). > Are there any real technical reasons for why this is so even > after Ada95, besides preserving backwards compatibilty? This is an explicit choice, and one that I think I would personally make the same way again. I have been teaching a "Programming Languages" course recently, and it is surprising how frequently students, even those conversant in C, are surprised that in some contexts, "Begin" and "BEGIN" mean two different things. One thing that some compilers do is warn the programmer if they use different upper/lower casing in a reference than in the declaration. E.g., if you declare something as "XYZ" but have a reference like "xyz" then you would get a warning. That seems like a friendly feature, and might even be worth enshrining in a language rule, or perhaps at least a pragma. > > 3. How can one block-comment in Ada? > It can become cumbersome sometimes, adding all those "--"s in > front of a large block of code one wants to "test out" on the fly. > Again, are there any good technical-engineering reasons why this > feature was left out? >From my perspective, being a big fan of "grep" (the Unix version of a file "search" command), I am always pleased that every line that has been commented out starts with "--". It can be quite distressing to think that a line is executable, and then discover that it is actually buried in a commented-out block. Note that most programmer-friendly text editors have an ability to insert something in front of every line of a block, or to remove same. Finally, in languages that do provide block comments, I find they rarely work right if the block being commented-out already contains comments. If you tend to comment at least once every 10 or so lines, a block of code doesn't have to be very big to require significant fiddling to allow block commenting to work. By contrast, you can always stick "-- " in front of every line, even if the line already contains a comment. Both of these latter two answers reflect in part Ada's philosophy of favoring the "reader" over the "writer." And since in most cases, even for our own code, we end up being a more frequent reader than a writer, this philosophy generally increases the overall productivity of the original programmer as well as some subsequent program reviewer/maintainer/enhancer. > > Regards, > -- > Frank Christiny fchris@pdq.net > Sr. Software Engineer Lockheed Martin Space Operations > Houston, Texas, USA http://freeweb.pdq.net/fchris/ -- -Tucker Taft stt@averstar.com http://www.averstar.com/~stt/ Technical Director, Commercial Division, AverStar (formerly Intermetrics) (http://www.averstar.com/services/IT_consulting.html) Burlington, MA USA