From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 1094ba,9f0bf354542633fd X-Google-Attributes: gid1094ba,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,d901a50a5adfec3c X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Rakesh Malhotra Subject: Re: Fortran or Ada? Date: 1998/09/22 Message-ID: <6u8t40$8uf$1@news-2.news.gte.net>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 393735589 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <36068E73.F0398C54@meca.polymtl.ca> Organization: gte.net X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-Auth: UNKNOWN@192.78.246.42 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Mime-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran,comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-09-22T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Jeff Templon wrote: > Hi, > one other word on Ada ... it is a very complex language. Take a look > at Cohen's "Ada as a Second Language" book and compare it Metcalf [snip] Hi Jeff, Yes, you are correct in saying that if someone needs to know the _full_ language then Ada is larger/more complex than, say, C is. However, as has been said many times before what kind of complexity are you talking about: - complex to read - complex to write compilers for - complex to program in - complex to learn etc Note: C is supposed to be simple but then it has these "complex" operator precedence rules which can bite you. Presumably you are refering to complex to learn, complex to write/read in. Here I would have to disagree. I learnt Ada about 8 years ago through a 5 day class. At this time I did not have much sw development experience (I knew some Pascal and C). Ada was very easy to learn. Ofcourse, since I was doing a safety critical system we were not taught the full language; just an appropriate, necessary subset. Over the years I have used this subset very successfully on many commercial projects and have taught myself other features of Ada as and when I needed them. I am sure that the above is what most people do when they start working in other languages also. I doubt that anyone first learns the full language and then does useful work. e.g. presently I am doing work that needs use of C and C++; I certainly do not know all of C++. The good thing about Ada is that it has a number of very useful, well designed features that all hang together well because they have been designed to do so. If you do not need a feature you can avoid using them without severely impacting other features that you do want to use. e.g if you do not want to use tasking you never need to know about it. Similarly if you do not need to use generics you can get by with very little knowledge of it. If you do not do much floating point (which I doubt since this is posted to c.l.fortran :) ) then you do not need to know about the special stuff Ada has to support fixed/floating types. Similar things can be said about other syntactic constructs. So, yes, Ada is big (I would call Ada big rather than complex) if you need to learn all of it at one go but if you don't then it is not that difficult. -- Rakesh