Re: Ada Generic vs. C++ Templates

[Francois Godme <fgodme@bigfoot.com>]

Ted Dennison a �crit :

> One thing you should be sure to mention is portability. All Ada compilers must
> adhere to (and are tested against) the same standard. In contrast, C++ compilers
> all seem to implement templates differently. The Mozilla developers have gone so
> far as to ban the use of templates for this reason (in fact, its rule #1 in
> their portability guide). See
> http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/portable-cpp.html#dont_use_templates . One could
> say that for code meant to be portable, C++ templates have no power at all, as
> they can't be used. :-)

For Ada supporters, it may be reassuring to rest on those somewhat outdated
statements but templates are working by now because they are central to the
implementation of the C++ Standard Templates Library (STL for short).

In my daily work, we develop C++ templates code which compiles and runs the same on
two different platforms namely Visual C++ 6.0 on NT and aCC on HP-UX. I am not
saying that all the implementations are perfect but that they are mature enough to
be of a practical use in a commercial environment.