Re: Why should hackers love Ada. (Re: Ada 95 based RTOS)

["Mike Dimmick" <mike@dimmick.demon.co.uk>]

"Gary Scott" <scottg@flash.net> wrote in message
news:38B80EBA.721830@flash.net...
> Robert Dewar wrote:
>
> > > > Gary wrote:
> > > >> I see this reference to ADA being good at bit twiddling,
> > periodically.
> > > >> Virtually all high-level languages provide facilities for
> > bit twiddling.
> >
> > Sure, but the facilities in Ada are far more powerful, allow
> > more control, and most importantly, provide a much better level
> > of abstraction. For example, packed bit arrays are a powerful
> > feature missing from C. Sure you can program this yourself in
> > C, but it is messy, error prone, and results in ugly and
> > possibly inefficient code.
> >
>
> C or C++ or both?  Fortran 95 has better facilities than C (and
certainly better
> syntax)...I do wish, however, that support for packed bit arrays was
more
> widespread.

C.  C++ has the <bitvector> as part of the standard library (alright,
it's not part of the language, but it should be there on all
implementations of standard C++).

Unfortunately not all compilers are standards-compliant yet.  MSVC 6 is
close, but missing a few things; GCC (egcs) isn't quite there yet
either.  For example, egcs has only just added support for namespaces,
while some of the stream_iterators are broken on MS VC++.

As an example of this, try compiling some of Stroustrup's examples from
'The C++ Programming Language'.  I'd advise anyone considering flaming
C++ to look at this book to see what it's truly capable of, and how you
should now program in C++ given the standard language and its
library.[1]  The C++ standards committee stole quite a few ideas from
Ada95.

--
Mike Dimmick

[1] The first rule is, forget anything and everything you ever knew
about C.