Re: Ada Advocacy.

["Stephane Richard" <stephane.richard@verizon.net>]

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"Luke A. Guest" <laguest@__n_o_s_p_a_m__abyss2.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:pan.2003.08.26.21.20.35.693597@__n_o_s_p_a_m__abyss2.demon.co.uk...
> On Tue, 26 Aug 2003 20:33:29 +0000, Stephane Richard wrote:
>
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > In the goal to boost the Ada  programming language, along with the
making of
> > my website, I'm looking for either documents, or links to comparisons
> > between ada and other languages, description of Ada features that set it
> > apart from other languages, basically any kind of PR there is out there
> > about Ada.
>
> Not an URL, but something that I and other programmers have always wanted
> to do in C/C++/etc. but cannot is the printing of names of variables ;-)
>
> That's a damn nice debugging feature. It's been a while but I think it's
> something like
>
> declare
> test : Integer := 5;
> begin
> -- I'm really unsure about the overloaded + operator here, like I said
> -- it's been a while (around 6 years!)
> Write test'Name + " = " + test;
> end
>
> should send "test = 5" to the console.
>
> Something like that anyway ;-P Try doing that in C/C++ without a lookup
> table :-(
>
> Another thing that's really useful is being able to declare the range of,
> say, an integer variable - and with bounds checking it gets caught at
> compile & runtime (depending on whether it's accessed with a constant or
> not).
>
> The only downside to Ada is the amount of work that has to go into a
> simple program just to dump out some text (not very good for beginners) to
> the console.
>
> Also meaningful names negates the need for the absolutely disgusting
> hungarian notation.
>
> I loved Ada at university and I'm really surprised that it's still not
> really used as much as it should be.
>
> Luke.
>
Excellent input Luke,

Indeed, a language like Ada should be used alot more than what I'm seeing
today.  It's part of the goal of the website I'm creating, to promote Ada,.
so all the good sides like those you mentionned here are excellent points.
Oh and as for that one downside.  I dont recall ever reading anywhere that C
and C++ were a "beginner's" language ;-).

Even if things have changed today and they teach C/C++ in computer schools,
me I learned on Pascal, and the structure you needed to have in Pascal made
for very readable code.  Ada being a superset of Pascal, takes this easy
maintainability aspect of Pascal to the next level.  Making projects tha
much more easier to read and maintain.  It's definitaly not as cryptic as C
and C++ have the potential to be (believe me, I've seen C code that almost
made me wanna give up some important parts of my anatomy. ;-).  Since Ada
has a somewhat predefined if you will structure like you say, if the
variables are named reasonability clear, then it only makes the whole code
that much clearer and quicker to maintain.

Thanks again for the input.....and if, in the course of time, something else
pops in your head, let me know :-)....you and anyone else :-)...even little
things like what Luke said are quite important advantages to Ada.


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St�phane Richard
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