Re: Faulty languages and Liability

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> Now I'm curious. You love C++. You work with C++. Yet you're regularly here
> on C.L.A? Do you have some other sort of interest in Ada? Or is it that you
> just want to defend C++ from some of its more ardent detractors? :-)
> 
> I'm not being critical - just curious as to what brings you here?

I consider myself somewhat of a programming language hobbyist.
I hang out here (as well as on comp.std.c++ and comp.lang.c++.moderated)
because I find the level of discourse, and of the participants, to be high
(yourself included). I don't dislike Ada at all, and I find it entertaining
to defend C++ against unfair claims here, as well as to post "Ada does it
much better this way" on the C++ groups.

There's also a certain amount of silver bulletness here that's fun to
puncture :-)

I find it very instructive, as I learn more about Ada, to try to figure
out the essential differences between Ada and C++ and how those differences
affect the expressiveness of the language. For example, I recently had an
epiphany regarding the difference between Ada's explicit generic instantiations
and C++'s automatic template instantiations. It's why you can't do units easily
in Ada, and why local variables can't be template parameters in C++.

And as C++ moves to adopt concurrent programming (which is almost certain to
happen in the next revision), I'm hoping (and urging) that the people involved
understand how Ada does it, so we don't wind up with a stupid hodgepodge. That
doesn't mean that it should look the same in C++, but they should understand
why certain decisions were made.