Re: Ada The Best Language?

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@home.com>]

Bertrand Augereau wrote:
> > > Leaving concurrency issues, why so? You can encapsulate system-dependant
> > > stuff as much in C++.
> >
> > True.  But some stuff is more compiler dependant, than Ada is (although
> there
> > can be differences between Ada compilers, however it is my understanding
> that
> > those are clearly documented).
> 
> That's unfortunately (for us C++ programmers!) true (especially for
> primitive types size), but nowadays, for instance, you can trust some quite
> large fundations on any platform : C runtime and STL.
> I think if I had to choose a language for this cross-platform consideration,
> I would take Java because you get much more things in the API.
> Basically for me, considering APIs, Java (+Network) > Ada(+Concurrency) >
> C++
> So it's just a question of where to draw a line, isn't it?

Hee, hee, but what are you going to do when you want to do a select(2) call
on a dozen file descriptors? Java doesn't give you a clean way to do this,
short of creating a dozen threads to each block on one descriptor. Or..
you can use non-blocking (gak) calls. Java still falls short in a number 
of places. Ada of course, would not prevent you from calling select(2) or
poll(2). To do it in Java, requires the use of native methods, which would
be oh so ugly (creation of a shared library etc. etc.)

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://members.home.net/ve3wwg