Re: Ada (was Rival JSF teams fly final STOVL flights with flair, highlight strengths)

["Matthew V. Jessick" <mjessick@gte.net>]

Ted Dennison wrote:

> Actually, wrong doesn't even begin to describe it. Ada supports both compile
> time and runtime polymorphism (I assume that's what's meant by "full
> polymorphism). C++ did indeed borrow some of Ada's ideas (eg: exceptions,
> generics, line comments), but by no means all the important ones. For instance
> it still does not sport any kind of native concurrency support, which is one of
> Ada's big draws. C++ does have some of C's syntax but it has a lot of its own
> too. C++ is a definite improvement over C, but its hardly a suitable substitue
> for Ada.

I've worked with UAV algorithms and software in Ada and now
work in video games using C++.
C++ to me requires considerably more discipline to program without
silly bugs.

The    if (A=B) {    mistake   where B is copied into A and if non-zero
the if condition is true.


if (A)
    B;
    C;

where C appears to be part of the loop but really isn't
just because the first programmer didn't "waste" time
putting in some "superfluous" curly braces and the maintenance
programmer wasn't sufficiently alert to catch it.

The case problem of having to hand code break statements
to separate case blocks:

switch(a)
  case b:
     sdfdasf;
     adsfdaadsf;
  case c:
    break;

In Ada, every possible value for (a) is required to be handled.
The additional error potential of hand coding break statements
is also removed.

And don't even get me started on {}{}{{{}}{}{}{}{}{{}
;}
or macros or multi-dimensional array syntax
or default argument passing by value or...

It just isn't suited to coding logic statements without
silly mistakes. (There are coding standards you can impose
to reduce these mistakes, but I miss my Ada compiler each time
I make one of them.)


- Matt