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From: Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Language design by by committee ( was Re: Try J# ( was Re: J#
 is there ))
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 09:00:36 +0200
Organization: Enyo's not your organization
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Date: 2001-10-16T09:00:36+02:00
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minyard@acm.org writes:

>> > ..and compared to C++, Ada is fairly small. 
>> 
>> I'm not sure if this is true if you look at the language core only
>> (and don't take into account any non-essential run-time library
>> components, such as containers or valarrays).
>
> It's true, especially if you include the language core.

>  Things like:
>
>  * Number of operators
>  * Number of reserved words
>  * Size of the specification (Note: This particular item is from vague
>    memory, but I think it's right).

250 vs. 300 pages is not a huge margin.

What about:

   * Number of different forms of type declarations
   * Number of representation control mechanisms
   * Elaboration issues
   * Tasking semantics

These language features are much more complex in Ada than in C++
(simply because C++ hasn't got some of these features).

In any case, I doubt that the "size" of the language tells us much
about the language itself.  Perhaps there are additional factors
that indicate that the language is too big (for example, if no
complete implementations exist), but size is not a problem per se.
For example, I think most if not all Ada programmers appreciate the
elaboration semantics.  They are rather complex, but without them,
very annoying problems would arise.