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From: gore@nucsrl.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang.ada
Subject: Re: ForTran-Ada + flamette + questi
Message-ID: <4000001@nucsrl>
Date: Tue, 3-Jun-86 15:11:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: nucsrl.4000001
Posted: Tue Jun  3 15:11:00 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Jun-86 03:46:22 EDT
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Nf-From: nucsrl.UUCP!gore    Jun  3 14:11:00 1986
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


>[ Discussion about lack of pointers to procedures in Ada ]
>
>You've gotta draw the line somewhere.  I'm continually amazed how
>people complain that Ada has either too much or not enough because
>it's left out their favorite feature from language X.  Considering the
>design goals for Ada, I think they did a good (not perfect) job of
>designing a language with which you can write both efficient and
>abstract, safe programs.

Personally, my complaint is more about the incomplete orthogonality of Ada 
than about lack of specific features.  If task types (and hence pointers to
tasks) are allowed, why not allow procedure types, package types, entry types?
We should not automatically assume that addition of these automatically means
making the language bigger.  For example, if there was a way to maintain
structures of entries, there would be no need for "families of entries".

Another example:  If only 'in' parameters are allowed in functions, why allow
access to external variables from inside a function?

Jacob Gore
Northwestern Univ
Comp Sci Research Lab
ihnp4!nucsrl!gore