Re: GUI was Re: why Ada is so unpopular ?

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Yeah, but that's still running smack-dab into my hypothetical objection 
to a matrix math package - that solving an N by M matrix where N and M 
are big is just plain going to take some time. Does that mean we 
shouldn't do it? Because *some* cases might perform poorly?

Well then, let's get rid of Text_IO because for some text files that get 
really large, its performance will be abysmal. And we shouldn't ought to 
have Unbounded_String because someone might try to fill it with a few 
megabytes of data and blow out the virtual memory. (We can find other 
examples, I'm sure. ;-)

Just because something might have poor performance in a case where large 
amounts of data are present is not an excuse to not do something in a 
language. Everyone seems to say "Yeah, we ought to have some kind of 
container library..." but then you don't want to actually use the 
container library in other compiler provided packages because it might 
be too slow for some cases? Then why should the developer use the 
container library? It might be too slow for his data as well.

I'd rather have a nicely integrated set of tools that all worked well 
with each other and if I have a case where performance demands I not use 
some capability, then I go for some work-around. For the rest of the 
cases (90%?) I didn't have to run off and roll my own to get the job 
done - it was already done for me. Wouldn't that be attractive to 
developers?

MDC

Warren W. Gay VE3WWG wrote:
> 
> The OP was referring to the fact that you cannot count on the fact
> that you will have a limited number of directory entries returned.
> The idea works if you insist on a "reasonable" sized directory.
> But this is outside of your control.
> 
> This is much like insisting that an SQL query should always return
> few enough rows, that can be held in the client program's memory.
> Many programs get written without thinking ahead about this very
> issue. Usually these short-sighted programs implement ok, but then
> with time passing, and database growing, it is realized that
> something else must be done about the original design.
> 


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Marin David Condic
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