Re: Look what I caught! was re:Ada paper critic

[dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison)]

"Alderson, Paul A." <Paul.Alderson@avistainc.com> wrote in message news:<mailman.1024335422.31035.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org>...
> Here's what I caught on my troll:
> 
> 1.) People who missed the point (maybe intentionally) of the big
>     chain of package names you end up with in some Ada packages.
> 
> The point here is if your company has a policy against using
> "uses" in their code, then you have to:
> 
>    A.) Use a renames
>    B.) Use the fully specified name.
>    C.) Ignore the standard and use use.


This honestly sounds like someone who hasn't used the language a whole
lot. The idiom one should adopt in "no use" code is to make the
package name part of the object's name, rather than tacking on extra
stuff to an object's name to differentiate it from objects in other
packages (the typical C approach). If you choose your names wisely,
then you loose nothing by using the fully-specified object name
(perhaps some "_"s change to "."s).

One of the reasons a lot of newbies don't get this for a while is that
the ARM sets a really bad example with its object naming. And yes, the
result is unspeakably ugly. Shame on the ARM writers.

> 3.) Many people in this group seem to have a "write the code
>     and never look at it again" attitude.  Writing code is only

A week ago I would have disagreed, but today I think you are right.
However, we try to educate them when they pop up. :-)

>     This brings up my discussion on why not being able to tell
>     an array from a function is a problem.  From the writing

An array is just a built-in mapping function. There's no reason you
need to know how the mapping function is implemented, unless you *do*
want to check the implementation for errors (in which case you'd have
to check anyway).


>     of the code its nice to be able to change your mind on
>     the implementation of a function to array.  But then again
>     why are you changing something like this?  This is an

  o Because some new factor arose that made the mapping dynamic
instead of static. (Perhaps in version 2, the customer requested more
control over the mapping).
  o Because another factor has been added that makes it not a simple
lookup (but you can perhaps default out all but one of the parameters,
leaving most user's code untouched).
  o Because you are using extreme programming techniques, so you start
with a simple array lookup to get things running, then later replace
it with the complicated mapping function.


> 8.) People seem to miss the point that no matter how great the
>     language is, if it has crappy compilers, crappy debugging
>     and a crappy IDE's then its going to be a interesting blip
>     on the software radar screen that fades out fast.  The

Then why is Microsoft still in the compiler business? Their C++
compiler totally sucks (worst error messages ever). Their IDE might be
somewhat nice now, but it sure didn't start out that way.