From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,28cd155693714664 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2002-06-17 22:18:06 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!news-out.nuthinbutnews.com!propagator-sterling!news-in.nuthinbutnews.com!cyclone1.gnilink.net!spamfinder.gnilink.net!nwrddc02.gnilink.net.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3D0EC296.8070504@mail.com> From: Hyman Rosen User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.1a) Gecko/20020614 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Faulty languages and Liability References: <3D0DE5E2.5010904@mail.com> <3D0DF19E.5010805@mail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 05:18:05 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 162.83.247.204 X-Complaints-To: abuse@verizon.net X-Trace: nwrddc02.gnilink.net 1024377485 162.83.247.204 (Tue, 18 Jun 2002 01:18:05 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 01:18:05 EDT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:26203 Date: 2002-06-18T05:18:05+00:00 List-Id: 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.