Re: ODRe: From extended Pascals to Ada 95 guide

["James Smith" <jksmithiii@mindspring.com>]

> Unfortunately, Modula-2 falls short of requirements met by Ada.  Although
there
> are
> many nice things about Modula-2, it is not as strongly typed,  has a more
> awkward model
> for abstract data types, and other shortcomings that those who know both
> languages can
> enumerate.
>
> Modula_3 is actually a considerable improvement and its technique for
supporting
> abstract
> data types is more sophisticated than that in Modula-2.   However, even
Modula-3
> is still
> not as strongly typed as Ada and continues to have little gaps in the
language
> definition that
> would be unacceptable for some of the kinds of projects undertaken by an
Ada
> designer.
>
> Be specific, you might say.  OK.  Just one example:  structural
equivalence
> instead of
> name equivalence for data types.

Yours and all the other responses have renewed my interest in Ada, so I'll
be taking a closer look. It's great to see so much public domain work being
done on Ada via GNAT, etc. I wish there was as much interest in M2. But
still, my feeling is that the differences between ISO M2 and Ada, wrt strong
typing, generics, exceptions, are far less than the difference between C and
Ada. And then when the gov gets involved, things become even more relative.
It seems that any great language, whether it be M2 or Ada, is devalued when
it is used on a OS platform written in C/C++. Would the discussion not be
more interesting if we were talking about Ada running on an OS written in
Ada, and M2 running on an OS written in M2?

James