Re: status of Ada STL?

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

Russ wrote:
> that. But I also did a little check on Cobol syntax, and I found that
> it actually uses "=" for assignment (in its "COMPUTE" statement). So

:-)
Yikes! You're right. I looked for it by doing a search through a lot of 
source code, and never found it. I guess that was a bad method. :-(

> assignment, as do Perl and Python. They are all wildly popular, with

I'd really like to see hard numbers on just how "wildly popular" and 
"rapidly growing" Python is. I've yet to personally bump into any Python 
code "in the wild", but of course that doesn't mean anything. Still, I'd 
be suprised if we didn't find orders of magnitude more Ada code out 
there, and a larger absolote growth for Ada as well (although probably 
less of a growth rate). Perhaps that's wrong too, but I think I'd need 
to see numbers on it before believing some absolute statement like that 
(particularly one comming from someone who thought Cobol was dead).


> Python growing radidly. Tcl was once consider a rising star, but now
> it seems to be fading away (though it still has a devoted group of
> core users). I personally happen to be a good Tcl programmer and I
> think it is the best language around for straight GUIs, so I am

I used to use TCL/TK quite a bit myself. It was really cool to be able 
to build GUI's interactively at the command line. What I eventually 
discovered was that I couldn't read and modify my own TCL code after 
about 6 months of not looking at it.

I don't know why anyone else quit using TCL, but for me its only big 
attraction was the portable GUI (TK). Once GTK+ came along, I had no 
further use for it. But in general, I think it was just a fad language. 
I have yet to be convinced that all of the other "scripting languages" 
aren't in that category too (although you could probably make a good 
case for Perl).