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From: ncohen@watson.ibm.com (Norman H. Cohen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: "Subtract C, add Ada"
Date: 23 Jan 1995 18:35:58 GMT
Organization: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <3g0sue$iba@watnews1.watson.ibm.com>
References: <3etund$hnr@miranda.gmrc.gecm.com>
 <3f4mbe$rud@cronkite.seas.gwu.edu> <3f5s92$3id@info.epfl.ch>
 <3fnf28$s3f@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM> <3frqpg$re5@cronkite.seas.gwu.edu>
Reply-To: ncohen@watson.ibm.com
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Date: 1995-01-23T18:35:58+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <3frqpg$re5@cronkite.seas.gwu.edu>, dobrien@seas.gwu.edu
(David O'Brien) writes: 

|> In article <3fnf28$s3f@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM> you wrote: 
|> : It's a question of who optimizes your code.  In the 60s,
|> : when C was developed, compilers *couldn't* optimize code,
|> : so the programmer had to.  Many apparently-bizarre C
|> : capabilities are there to support optimization level -1
|> : (programmer does the optimizations).
...
|> : Consider the common C idiom to copy a null-terminated
|> : array, usually a string [syntax may not be quite right]: 
|>
|> :      while (*a++=*b++);
|>
|> I am curious about programming culture.  Notice that when someone writes
|> something in C they feel they have to remove all white space.  When they
|> write in Ada they put in plenty and use [very] long names for every
|> thing.  Why is that???  No wonder people say C is hard to read.

It's because the primitive compilers of the 1970's were incapable of
optimizing away the whitespace. ;-)

--
Norman H. Cohen    ncohen@watson.ibm.com