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From: davidt@cpsc.ucalgary.ca (David Taylor)
Subject: Re: C/C++ knocks the crap out of Ada
Date: 1996/03/20
Message-ID: <4ipsoj$iri@linux.cpsc.ucalgary.ca>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 143731366
references: <00001a73+00002504@msn.com> <4iah20$p7k@saba.info.ucla.edu>
 <4ictel$18v@tpd.dsccc.com> <4id4cc$1rau@saba.info.ucla.edu>
organization: University of Calgary CPSC
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++
Date: 1996-03-20T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <4id4cc$1rau@saba.info.ucla.edu>,
Jay Martin <jmartin@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
>
>I personally do not find complex text file formats as an exceptable
>user friendly method of input in this day and age.  Users should look
>at GUI's not goofy text files.  Thus, slight differences in the
>flexiblity of file formats is really of little concern these days as
>no one should be really looking at them. Besides grammer style legacy
>text file formats I see little use for parsing besides writing your
>own C++ or Ada95 or other language compiler ( or pretty printer, etc).
>Something I am not planning to do anytime soon.  So has GUI's and huge
>languages really ruined the usefulness of parsing, or am I forgetting
>some important uses of parsers.

How about tools for extracting information from source code?  If you
use a structured commenting convention in your code, then you can
extract extremely useful documentation with a simple parser.  (Doesn't
Java have something like this?)

Or how about small custom tools?  For example, one project I worked
(using C) on had a tool to generate prototype files.

Besides, with text based formats, you can do remote configuration a
lot more easily (I'm guessing you're not using X).

-- 
Andrew Taylor     |email: davidt@cpsc.ucalgary.ca
                  |www:   http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~davidt