Re: Ada Annoyances

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

> >You cannot say it was ill-advised without knowing the context and purpose.
> 
> Of course I can. The purpose of the Initialize routine is to "fix-up" an 
> existing initialized object

I can understand that, but the name of this procedure does not convey this meaning. Even your own sentence above sounds illogical.

> Again, the flaw in Ada here is that the purpose behind 
> these routines (Initialize/Adjust/Finalize) isn't as obvious

There seems to be an agreement here.

> >Let's say I did consider it VERY carefuly.
> 
> Then you've also considered the negative side-effects

Which I was not aware of until I was hit by them.
(Interestingly, you could defend every single con of C++ the same way and ultimately prove that there are no problems with it. Beware, such arguments are double-edged swords.)

> But all I see here is you trying to prove that C++ is better than Ada. If 
> so, why are you wasting our time here?

On the contrary. Actually, I'm an official Ada advocate at my workplace. The problem is - you need to be *very* precise when discussing advantages of one language over another and there is absolutely no chance you will ever convince anybody to use Ada if you try to praise it by contrasting it with misunderstood flaws of C++ (or Java or whatever).

In this very discussion I have seen multiple statements that C++ is broken beyond all repair and the statement that particularly called my attention was about C++ being "untyped", while in fact the construction process there is relatively well thought-out and designed to preserve the type safety, which I tried to demonstrate. Another statement was about inability of C++ to suppress dispatching calls. This is when I have decided to play the devil's advocate and demonstrate that without proper arguments - and in particular without being fair and giving justice where it is due, you have no chance of convincing anybody. Ada is an interesting language for large-scale development, but it has its own share of language design flaws. It is unavoidable with such a long history, but at least be fair.

> Go back to the evil empire

To which one? :-)

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.inspirel.com