Re: Computer languages

[crispen <@ada3.ca.boeing.com:crispen@efftoo.boeing.com>]

Sorry for the heresy that follows, but every time there's any text
to process, it's C for me.  I've got a couple of C programs I wrote
for the last Ada program I was on that generated Ada text -- the idea
was to find the sizes of a bunch of interface data objects, so good
old Ada's 'SIZE attribute is wonderful.  But extracting the declarations
from various packages, putting them together to make compilable Ada
code (lots of file I/O, lots of text manipulation) -- that's a job
for C.

I even pragma Interface to printf for error/status messages.  There
is an advantage to that in our environment; you can pragma
Interface_Name it to logMsg in VxWorks so that you can print
even at interrupt level -- something that Text_IO can't do.

Of course, I didn't have to deliver these utilities.

A buddy of mine just did a big interactive text and file thing using
Ada and it took him 3 days.  I'm certain he could have done it in C
in half a morning.

Oh, yeah, heavy operating system interfaces.  I always do a quick
hack in C for things like sockets, rpcs and so on so that I know
I understand it.  Then I write some Ada bindings and redevelop in Ada.

Even on the most anally controlled programs there's going to be a
need for some quick, nasty hacks to get an unexpected job done
right away.  F-22 seems to doubt this.  Boy are they going to be
surprised.
+-------------------------------+--------------------------------------+
| Bob Crispen                   |           Co-workers don't           |
| crispen@foxy.boeing.com       +--------------------------------------+
| (205) 461-3296                |Opinions expressed here are mine alone|
+-------------------------------+--------------------------------------+