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From: dmitry@elros.cbb-automation.de (Dmitry Kazakov)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: C++ virtual function mechanism in Ada ?
Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2001 08:09:39 GMT
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On 27 Jul 2001 19:10:11 -0700, dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) wrote:

>dmitry@elros.cbb-automation.de (Dmitry A. Kazakov) wrote in message news:<3b600dd2.859745@news.cis.dfn.de>...
>
>> It depends. I remember in my high school years [middle 80s], Ada 83
>> was already well known. It was not taught [FORTRAN and PL1 were
>> lectured] but it was recomended for self study and sometimes hotly
>> discussed. In contrary to this, C was completely unknown
>
>Well any high school can teach anything and that does not prove much
>(some high schools in the states teach creationism :-)

In my case it was Marxism (:-))

>But in fact C was of course well known in that period, and any
>programming language course not mentioning C that was taught in
>the middle 80's was really decrepit. C is for example definitely
>a whole generation after Fortran, and to teach Fortran and PL1 
>without mentioning C at that time in a PL course is more than
>a bit odd!

I think there was a reason behind. Our major was applied mathematics.
C was hardly suitable for that (no true arrays, no overflow checks
etc). {}-brackets alone were a big problem that time. I saw an Algol
compiler that required all keywords be put in ''-quotes, like 'BEGIN'.
Presumably, because the machine had only capitals (:-))

>My first exposure to C was on a PDP-11 in the early 70's. Very
>nice compiler and a very nice system (a single 128K PDP-11 could
>happily support dozens of users in time sharing mode :-)

Lucky were you. My C compiler took about 5-10 min for hello-world (5-6
passes or so) on a PDP-11, so I switched back to MACRO-11.

Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov