Re: next "big" language?? (disagree)

[ucaa2385@alpha1.csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de (Peter Hermann)]

Kurt Johmann (johmann@moal.com) wrote:
: Programming languages are almost completely subjective, because the only

I strongly disagree

: minds apparently like that kind of enforced discipline (masochist types,
: perhaps :-), but to my mind it was a build-your-own-straightjacket-and-
: wear-it kind of approach to programming.

the opposite is true: a professional is always thankful for every
hint from the compiler or environment for potential errors.
Working with languages of the past like Fortran or C is true
masochism. I have worked on very large systems in Fortran
(one was a half million source lines of code, the other 300_000 sloc)
and we had to run the systems on every hardware brand.
I can see no advantage to allow e.g. a memory overwrite error,
by accident, or, e.g. an outside range value at run time or
a wrong subroutine call due to bad parameter profile.

When I decide, as a programmer, that a peculiar type or
variable may have a value in the range from 1 to 9, can you please
explain me why it should be useful to assign a value of 10 or
4711 or -1234?
I will justify the value of that freedom in your favour:
This has the big advantage that the typical Fortran, C, or C++
programmer being not immediately aware of an erroneous code
is happy to catch the error all-day-long and when the day is done,
he is proud to have found this bug and fully convinced to 
have fulfilled his work of the day.
In contrast, a poor Ada programmer does not have this fun:
a potential error is revealed at the moment of the very first 
compilation/execution. What a pity! No fun at all ;-(
The product life cycle is shortened. No bug chasing.
no extra lint steps, because its unfortunately in 
the language design.

btw: Ada is the first useful (and even readable) Pascal
     with free compilers running on any platform

--
Peter Hermann  Tel:+49-711-685-3611 Fax:3758 ph@csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de
Pfaffenwaldring 27, 70569 Stuttgart Uni Computeranwendungen
Team Ada: "C'mon people let the world begin" (Paul McCartney)