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,e7ceb00d83425e3a X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news2.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!newsfeed00.sul.t-online.de!t-online.de!feeder.news-service.com!tudelft.nl!txtfeed1.tudelft.nl!feeder1.cambrium.nl!feed.tweaknews.nl!not-for-mail From: Ludovic Brenta Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: rant (Re: Ada featured in Doctor Dobb's Journal ) References: <31a97103-1cbb-47b5-a93c-2a29c206556f@e39g2000hsf.googlegroups.com> <0d254195-50cb-4bad-b776-8d5c2ab09b6c@m45g2000hsb.googlegroups.com> Date: Sat, 17 May 2008 10:28:06 +0200 Message-ID: <878wy9uyg9.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> User-Agent: Gnus/5.110006 (No Gnus v0.6) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:tOI17Bngwh0BHACIN/iYycmdXz4= MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Organization: Tele2 X-Trace: DXC=J6RCDO66=UYk4WhUE5 jhc0033@gmail.com writes: > Right now, the article basically says: "Fortran had some cool features > C didn't have, but C had some features Fortran didn't have, and we > switched to C. But this guy uses Ada, because as we saw before, using > different languages is OK, and the safety community uses it. He solved > some discrete math problem he was trying to solve. He could have > solved it just as easily in any other language perhaps, but would we ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > write an article about it? The end". The whole point of the article is the "just as easily" bit. The author says that he solved his problem *more easily* in Ada than he could have in C or Fortran, despite his extensive experience (11 years as a professional) in C and little exposure (6 months as a hobbyist) to Ada. > Right now, I'm evaluating Ada as a language to learn and do my next > project in. I already know more diverse non-mainstream languages > than most people, so I'm not exactly closed-minded. But this article > hasn't convinced me of anything. I commend you for your open-mindedness and your sound process of evaluating before deciding. Few people indeed have enough common sense to do that. The article does not speak about C++. If what you want is a comparison of C++ versus Ada, look elsewhere, like e.g. http://archive.adaic.com/docs/present/engle/comments/ > A few days ago, I looked at Eiffel, and I'm now convinced that I > wouldn't like it. Eiffel targets a largely similar audience of > "correctness-oriented" programmers that Ada does. However, it took > some digging around (no introductions to the language mention it) to > discover that Eiffel has a gap in its type system. Guess what, type > theory is a branch of math, and OOP is a spiritual following. I know > what takes precedence in my book. The Eiffel community's attitude is > basically: "we'll just pretend 2+2=5 because we can use it to > justify some teachings". I evaluated Eiffel too when I read Bertrand Meyer's Object-Oriented Software Construction book. The two things I dislike the most about Eiffel are the lack of range constraints on numeric types and the fact that almost all contract checks are deferred to run-time. I strongly prefer compile-time checks over run-time checks, and a language with no checks at all quickly disappears from my radar. -- Ludovic Brenta.