RE: Ada The Best Language?

[Vinzent Hoefler <vinzent@MailAndNews.com>]

Original Message From taw@users.sourceforge.net

>Please append to this list and/or comment about these items:
[...]
>- less freely available real-world example code

I won't need a complete Linux Kernel written in Ada to get familiar with
the language.

>- too strong typing

What? Sorry, but the typing is a great plus. It's true, you have to think a
little more about it when designing types and sometimes this might be a 
little
bit annoying ;), but is thinking really that *bad*?

If nothing helps, there's still the feature of Unchecked Type Conversions.
At least you were warned then. :)

>- very verbose syntax

That's what I like in Ada. You see the code. You read the code. You see what 
it does. You understand it.

I find "A := A mod 100;" much more readable than "A%=100;"

It says what it does, even if you don't know almost nothing about the
language. Is that a negative? You can read and _understand_ the code even if
you don't read the comments if some there are at all[*]. The problem seems
to be that most programmers are lazy when writing code. OTOH, they then wish
their colleagues to hell when they have to maintain the code until they 
realize
that it was their own code. :)

[*] I understand that most Ada programmers probably have a better style in
code documentation anyway. So that's not really a point. :)

>- no printf or equivalent

Oohooh. You don't really need a debugger. ;-)

BTW, printf() almost never does what it looks like.

  printf("The value is %l", some_value);

Quite correct C, IIRC. Are you sure, if it gives you the correct result?


Vinzent.

-- 
Real programmers don't comment their code.
It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.