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From: snidely@nosun.UUCP (David Schneider)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Grunt factor
Message-ID: <631@intelisc.nosun.UUCP>
Date: 17 Mar 90 02:21:56 GMT
References: <19410@grebyn.com> <1533@wacsvax.OZ>
Organization: intel Scientific Computers, Beaverton OR
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <1533@wacsvax.OZ> kim@wacsvax.OZ (Kim Shearer) writes:
>
>I was a hard core C fan, and still am, however I was forced in
>the course of my job to program in ADA. I would have to say that
>for large projects that do not make extensive use of the low
>level facilities of C....It may be difficult to hach [sic] in ADA but....

I've found that bit-twiddling in Ada is fun, if that is what you're
referring to.  Of course, the twiddling I did was non-portable
(some ways are), but that's ok since they were highly specific
to the hardware (I was providing hw support for the OS).

I'm also very fond of being able to figure where something's declared
without having to grep an entire source database.  I ran across this
problem while maintaining some C code where I didn't have access to
a tags file.

I'm not really sure what you do mean by low-level facilities,
although my imagination runs away at certain uses of 'switch' and
'for'.

And while Ada forces you to be explicit about how other code accesses
you, there is nothing that prevents the code behind an interface
from showing a life of its own (that's a humorous way of describing
drastric changes).  *Of course, some people have critized the
explicit-interface idea as freezing a design too early.
They feel that you're unlikely to get an interface right at the
start of a project, and there's some merit to that idea,
but I don't find Ada's specification system as a handicap to changing
an interface, but rather a tool that ensures it is changed uniformly.

Well, I'd better step away from the soapbox before I turn into
kill-file fodder.

					Dave Schneider
					Friday before vacation, 3.16.90

*I've a feeling that Elements of Style calls for a paragraph break here,
but I'll risk damnation to avoid reformatting in vi when I should be
going home.  Imagine someone whose religion includes both Emacs and Ada.

					dps