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!news2.google.com!news4.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: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 06:48:23 -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> <87sle0sv9o.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 13:48:22 +0100 Message-ID: <87mz48oajt.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> User-Agent: Gnus/5.110006 (No Gnus v0.6) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:NSSi+3iDlYjw4El/eyRHeDSVwcI= MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii NNTP-Posting-Host: 62.235.239.130 X-Trace: sv3-5DLM8aQyL0KfL6uZkavD8TH7339pQWDRMHDmVpewMEhk2Nca2JSrtOCieF1bIuEChmywFdgukZpiluO!h7w1xs5ZvPGPPxRusqTO901wU0B72aKK04S+LNUPIQyZOgi15YvYizG3uMMNtcYBrHLXPsT0pPU= 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:8478 Date: 2007-01-24T13:48:22+01:00 List-Id: Markus E Leypold writes: > Hi Ludovic, > > Ludovic Brenta writes: > >> kevin cline writes: >>> But the point was that expressiveness drives programmers to new >>> languages, and Ada isn't particularly expressive. >> >> On the contrary, I think that Ada is the most expressive language >> around. > > If I were in the business of language advocacy as some people in this > thread obviously are, I'd now cry: "FUD!!" [...] > I do not want to denigrate Ada here. But I think judging the place of > Ada in the world right is more important (or useful to Ada or the > community) than claming ALL the superlatives for Ada. OK, I'll take back what I said above, and replace with "Ada is the most expressive language I know of." I can't comment on Haskell or OCaml because I don't know them well enough. >> procedure Set_Bit_In_Register (At_Address : in System.Address) is >> type Register is array (1 .. 32) of Boolean; >> pragma Pack (Register); >> for Register'Bit_Order use System.High_Order_First; >> pragma Volatile (Register); >> >> R : Register; >> for R'Address use At_Address; >> begin >> Register (4) := True; >> end; >> >> versus >> >> void set_bit_in_register (volatile unsigned long * at_address) >> { >> *at_address |= 2 << 3; >> } > > > You're sure you're not confusing verbosity with "expressiveness"? :-) > No, but there is bound to be some correlation. Expressiveness is the ability to carry a lot of information across to the human programmer as well as to the compiler. Verbosity, or its opposite conciseness, is the density of that information, as in "information units per line of code" or some such ill-defined measure. Ada is more expressive than C because it allows programmes to express more information. In a way, it is also more concise in that Ada compilers insert all sorts of implicit checks, and in that Ada has built-in constructs like tasking, array slices and return of dynamically-sized objects that require much more lines of code to achieve in C. But C more concise than Ada in other ways; for example "volatile unsigned long *" does not require a separate type definition, and "{}" takes only 11.765% of the space of "begin; null; end;" -- Ludovic Brenta.