Re: Ada 12 times more popular than Eiffel

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Jun 4, 10:38 am, Pascal Obry <pas...@obry.net> wrote:
> Not sure he has said that Eiffel was inspired from Ada, maybe on the
> early days... IIRC,

No, YDNRC.

> in his book Object-Oriented Software Construction
> there is very few (if any) references to Ada.

In the edition I'm looking at (1988), Chapter 18 is called "Object-
Oriented programming and Ada".  That's a whole chapter that discusses
this language (more than is done for any other individual language; C+
+ just gets a one-page subsection).  Plus, looking just at the index,
there appear to be 13 references to Ada outside of this chapter.  The
beginning of Chapter 3.5 says, "Modular languages such as Modula-2 and
Ada offer a first step towards more appropriate solutions."  (But I
guess that's not the same thing as saying he was "inspired" by it.)
Also, the Wikipedia entry for Eiffel lists Ada (along with Simula and
Z) as an influence---as a sidebar, with no attribution, so I don't
know how accurate that is.

A Google search didn't turn up much.  It appears that Meyer has some
criticisms of Ada, but I couldn't find anything that would indicate
that he hates it.  His Eiffel site has an article about the Ariane 5
crash, but he said there that the language couldn't really be blamed
because the problem could have been caught using Ada's exception
mechanism (even though I gather he doesn't like this mechanism) if the
programmers had used it properly.

                                     -- Adam