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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,21960280f1d61e84 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news3.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local01.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.scarlet.biz!news.scarlet.biz.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2007 19:18:48 -0600 From: Ludovic Brenta Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: How come Ada isn't more popular? References: <1169531612.200010.153120@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1169588206.234714.312650@k78g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1169624573.534128.172610@s48g2000cws.googlegroups.com> <4EBuh.15104$pQ3.9387@newsread4.news.pas.earthlink.net> <45bb4e53$1_4@news.bluewin.ch> Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2007 02:18:45 +0100 Message-ID: <877iv8dk3u.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> User-Agent: Gnus/5.110006 (No Gnus v0.6) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:yLXfVBByks4LliTrcbB0ROkVv7Q= MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii NNTP-Posting-Host: 62.235.240.178 X-Trace: sv3-nRXEVIhYFziB4cFy6I98acbC1EjnvCNzS7jJ9OD/9qiPO0AVY9pWQXY3km+CeW+v6YO0Ctyhc6NXY8d!YEws1Xix1k52bV5Gg1iXcAnpW1zf2zcaGUNq7xQPM9Ymxz3mvpXWTBpGRzr3pPsa39vQS0MNfkI= X-Complaints-To: abuse@scarlet.be X-DMCA-Complaints-To: abuse@scarlet.biz X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.32 Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:8640 Date: 2007-01-28T02:18:45+01:00 List-Id: Charles D Hixson writes: > basically Ada83 appears to take approx 1.5 times as many lines to do > the same thing. (I didn't count the lines. It's a rough estimate. > Say somewhere between 1.1 and 1.9 times as many lines.) Possibly > this is a comment on the skills of the authors, but the number of > extensive comparisons I've encountered is very limited. (Or maybe > it's a comment on Ada83, and doesn't apply to Ada95.) In my experience, the ratio is close to 1.0. Ada's verbosity in some areas (type declarations and explicit conversions, access types, traditionally longer identifiers and keywords, etc.) is compensated for by more concise constructs in others like array slices, returning objects of unconstrained types, generics, overloading, implicit rather than explicit run-time checks, etc., so it all evens out. Ada 95's main feature, object-oriented programming, does not have a direct equivalent in C; so writing an object-oriented program in C, complete with dynamic dispatching and run-time type identification, would be much more verbose than in Ada. For example, GTK+ and GNOME are written in pure C but are object-oriented, and _quite_ verbose. The same would apply to tasking and generics. Maybe your observation is true for smaller programs. It may be that for very large programs, Ada is actually more concise than C... -- Ludovic Brenta.