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From: Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pl1,comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada Versus PL/I - The debate continues
Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2003 20:02:29 -0800
Organization: AdaWorks Software Engineering
Message-ID: <3E73F755.79E9723B@adaworks.com>
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Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.pl1:4509 comp.lang.ada:35372
Date: 2003-03-16T03:51:55+00:00
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robin wrote:

> Why do you assume that no-one else knows anything about Ada?
> My statements are not "blatantly" "incorrect".
>
> I stand by my statement that PL/I is better than Ada
> in input-output, built-in functions, error-recovery,
> decimal fixed-point arithmetic.
>
> Furthermore, it is easier to use in those areas.

I am cc'ing comp.lang.ada.

And your observations indicate that you have very little
knowledge of the current version of Ada.   As to built-in
functions,  Ada has a powerful collection of these. However,
some of the functions built-in to PL/I are, as part of the Ada language
standard, implemented in standard libraries.  There is no
performance penalty and there is a significant portability
benefit.

Ada's support for decimal arithmetic is as good as, and perhaps
a little better than PL/I.    This is an important addition to the
current version of Ada which was, admittedly, a drawback in
the first version of Ada.  That drawback has been corrected and
in correcting it, the designers learned a lot about what not to do
from other languages (maybe even PL/I).

Error recovery in Ada works quite well, thank you.

As to ease-of-use, this is always in the eye-of-the beholder.  In my
experience, Ada is a very easy language to use.  It is more readable
than PL/I or C++, and the consequence of that is that it is also easier
to maintain.

Now.  There are so many things Ada does include such as generics,
concurrency, and programming by extension, that PL/I cannot do that
your attempt at comparing the two indicates that your knowledge of
Ada is, at best, superficial.

Richard Riehle