Re: Ada access vs C/C++ pointers and references

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

Nick Roberts wrote:
 >
 >> Third, if Ada does not provide arithmetic pointers do you know if
 >> this has played any part in acceptance of Ada for systems
 >> programming or efficiency critical applications?
 >
 >
 > I don't know (sorry).
 >
Ada 83 missed address arithmetic and modular types and while it is hard
to tell what impact that had, I know it did not thrill people who had to 
do bare-machine type of jobs. However, Ada 95 has this and it doesn't 
seem to be creating a groundswell of support in the embedded world. Note 
that C and C++ tend to lack the really great low-level representation 
capabilities of Ada and I frankly don't know how the poor guys who use 
those languages for embedded systems can get along without them. 
Nevertheless, they do & Ada has only a small smidgen of the embedded 
systems market.

I suspect that you can't point at any one feature or lack of it (Like 
the infamous "+=" debate?) and say "This causes Language X to be 
popular/unpopular" I think it just has more to do with what people know 
and their resistance to change without some perceived major benefit. 
People got used to programming with C because it was readily available 
and interfaced to the OS. Ada comes along and so people start thinking: 
"Well, its not C and it doesn't even look remotely like C, so let me 
start dreaming up reasons why its bad so I won't have to learn how to 
use it..."

MDC
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