Re: Why C++ is successful

[John McCabe <jgm@hayling.cwmbran.gecm.com>]

Just for the sake of interest, when I first started watching this 
newsgroup (comp.lang.ada) around 3.5 years ago, it was very much from the 
point of view of wanting to convince people that Ada is not worth the 
effort any more. Looking back, I found that there were a few, let�s say, 
inadequacies in Ada 83 that, in my view, let down the whole language. 
Also at the time I much preferred the C language (actually I liked Occam 
even better, but it never really caught on!), and hated the idea that I 
was being forced to use Ada against what I considered to be my better 
judgement.

My views on Ada have completely changed since then. It was pointed out by 
a number of very helpful people around here that there were reasons and 
workarounds for the �inadequacies� I mentioned, but also that some of 
them at least had been addressed in Ada 95 and so were not relevant any 
more, however the main turning point came when I got gold of the GNAT 
compiler just to write a fairly noddy program which would hopefully run 
on both a PC and Sun Workstation. Normally I would have knocked this up 
in C and spent some time debugging it. This time I decided to try Ada and 
found that once I�d managed to get the program to compile, it pretty much 
did what I had wanted (apart from a few very trivial, and very easy to 
find bugs). When I ported it across to Solaris, and recompiled with GNAT 
for Solaris, it worked first time!

This would never have happened if I�d written it in C.

As far as C++ is concerned, I spent a long time trying to persuade my 
boss to let me go on a C++ course. I never got it as there was apparently 
no need for it (despite the fact that even Ada contract software guys are 
now getting the opportunity to learn C++ in that department!! - I left 1 
year ago). My view now is that I would still like to learn C++, but only 
really for interest, from what I know of Ada 95 and C++, Ada 95 certainly 
seems to be the more understandable language and, with the increasing 
size and complexity of software systems which require maintenance, I know 
what I�d rather maintain.



-- 
Best Regards
John McCabe

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