Re: Ada OO Mechanism

[Steve <Steve@newsguy.com>]

In article <37457752.7A73DF4D@pwfl.com>, Marin says...

 
>I did quite a
>bit of Fortran programming, but always keeping in mind Pascal's flow
>structures, etc., which resulted in much more reliable and easier to
>understand Fortran code. Yet people I knew who had dealt strictly with
>Fortran found it difficult to deal with things like defining variables
>before they used them, lack of common blocks, etc. 

The reason they had trouble with it, is simple. FORTRAN programmers, by
definition, are mostly scientists and engineers from different disciplines
other than computer science, i.e. their main profession is not software,
but they use software as a tool to do help them with their main profession,
which is engineering (such as Civil eng., electrical, etc..)

So, as long as it what they wrote works, they do not understand
why you need to spend more time to 'improve' it.

I've had to maintain and fix code written by PhD's in other fields and 
engineers like the above, and they write the worst code any one can see. 
I think there should be a rule against those people writing code, at least
code that need to be maintained by someone else. 

Imagine if you had hard time dealing with FORTRAN written by those people,
I had to look at Pearl code written by them! I had nightmares for days after
that experience.


Steve