Re: ada paper critic

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

Immanuel Scholz wrote:
> Actually he is the only one trying to filter out some arguments AGAINST ada 
> (sometimes more destructive than constructive).

True. Unfortunately, all his points range from 180 degrees wrong to just 
ignorant. When someone is so wrong so consistently over so much stuff, 
you have to think that we are dealing with a case where someone has an 
agenda and it trying to make the facts fit it instead of the other way 
around.

> (Nevertheless, I think that giving the same syntax to Arrays and functions 
> is good, not bad.)

We've actually had a lot of discussion here about that. Almost everyone 
who ever complains about it is an ex-C programmer who's main problem 
always boils down to "it doesn't look like C".

I have very little patience for people who have problems with Ada not 
looking like C. Ada was just about the most thouroughly designed 
language ever, while C was thrown together in a lab over the weekend. 
You might not agree with all of the reasoning, but at least there is a 
rational reason for nearly every difference Ada has.

On the other hand, most of the approaches C took were based on either 
historical accidents, spontaneious whims, or whatever was the quickest 
hack to solve a language problem that day. Perhaps one or two good 
things came out of it, but there's no good coherent design in there at 
all. The only reason people are still using it is that the lab guys who 
created it built the first Unix with it, not because the language itself 
is any good.

Thus, arguing that all languages should use the same features as C is 
like saying all piles of trash should have bannana peels and moudly 
oranges on the bottom because that's the way the biggest mound in the 
dump ended up.