Re: Java vs. Ada - strings (was: C vs. Ada - strings)

["Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org>]

"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:8hgb3m$bs$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
> In article <LVu_4.10342$kf5.70362@typhoon.nyroc.rr.com>,
>   "Pete" <tyrone@nowhere.org> wrote:

> > > I've never done this myself because in 11 years of Ada work I've
> > > never had much need for ragged string arrays. That's probably why
> > > Ada doesn't come with a type for them. :-)
> > i've already had a use for them in the 6 months that i started this
> > new ada
>
> You're starting to get at my point here. Most of the "Ada's support for
> XXX sucks" folks come from the perspective of trying to use techniques
> designed around the features (and failings) of another language in Ada,
> rather than from a sober analysis of the full benefits and drawbacks of
> the supporting Ada features. If I were a betting man, I'd wager that
> this approach occured to you because you are used to using this
> (unusual) construct from a lanugage that makes it easy, and it would not
> have occurred at all in the code of a "native" Ada person.

That doesn't seem very fair... how about testing the thesis with a nice,
non-language-specific requirement? For example: "Create a list of the names
of the people who participated in this thread." I hope that "list" is
reasonably well-defined as to its methods, etc. (delete an item on the list,
replace an existing item, add an item to the end of the list, select a
specific item by its location in the list). What would that look like in
Java and Ada, and what are the advantages/disadvantages of each? I could
certainly seeing a ragged string array (in any language) as a reasonable
approach to addressing this requirement...