Re: is Ada dying?

[John English <je@brighton.ac.uk>]

"Robert*@" wrote:
> 
> In article <3BC2F035.FB6AA434@brighton.ac.uk>, John says...
> > and a permanently-handy API reference.
> 
> I am confused.
> 
> Are you saying a small standard library which does almost nothing, is
> better becuase then the programmer does not have to have an API handy
> to remember anything?
> 
> what kind of logic is this?
> 
> so I assume the language you will design will have only 'PUT' and 'GET' in
> it, this way no programmer will ever need a manual to use it (and of course
> no one will use the language becuase in the real world programmers need to
> do more things).

No, what I'm saying is that shunting linguistic features (e.g. tasking)
into the API increases the memory burden -- linguistic features need
a linguistic rationale, whereas with API design you're at the whim of
the API designer. You know there's a class containing a method, but
your knowledge of the language helps not at all to remember the name
of the class or the name of the method or the types and ordering of
the parameters. So e.g. slicing a string by writing str.substr(5,4)
is less clear IMHO that str(5..9) -- you have to remember that the
method is called "substr", not "subString" or "slice" or whatever,
and that the first parameter is a zero-based index, and that the
second is a length rather than another index. And you can't then
apply the same technique to another class like Vector, you have
to learn a different method name and set of parameters. You lose
orthogonality, basically.

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