Re: ADA vs Java

[Dale King <DaleWKing@insightbb.nospam.com>]

The Wogster wrote:
> Ted wrote:
> 
>> Writing code in ADA 95 and compiling it for the JVM should produce more
>> reliable code than writing in Java 2. Does anyone know any good technical
>> reasons for prefering Java?
>>
> 
> The argument is more like, which language has a more reliable 
> conversation, French or German?  Well people have been having 
> conversations in both, for hundreds of years.

Interesting analogy, but it misses the important detail of the compiler. 
In your analogy of human language it would be like having a proofreader 
of what you were saying in the languages. In one case the proofreader is 
much better than the other being much more strict about grammar, making 
sure that you didn't have run-on sentences and passive voice.

Ada is a much stricter compiler and has much stronger typing (realizing 
that term means different things to different people). My experience 
using a similar type of language (Modula-2) is that it is harder to get 
things to compile because the "proofreader" keeps correcting your sloppy 
expressions and bad grammar, but when it did compile it was much more 
likely to be correct when executed.

The problem with translating Ada or other languages to Java is that the 
JVM lacks certain constructs that are part of other languages. The 
simplest example would be that Java lacks unsigned numerical types in a 
size other than 16 bits.

-- 
  Dale King