From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,e3feb606f668a7c1 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: "Mike Dimmick" Subject: Re: Why should hackers love Ada. (Re: Ada 95 based RTOS) Date: 2000/03/07 Message-ID: <952461466.12261.0.nnrp-12.d4e5bde1@news.demon.co.uk>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 594404864 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-NNTP-Posting-Host: dimmick.demon.co.uk:212.229.189.225 References: <88ilp7$bcm$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <38ADCA44.3B91BF6F@averstar.com> <88qli0$gvr$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <38B2A2A1.FDCDDFE7@honeywell.com> <88ugrd$7j7$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <890ght$bih1@ftp.kvaerner.com> <38B3EA94.E3AB4929@maths.unine.ch> <38B41432.88D7389F@quadruscorp.com> <38B47521.1A80B6A1@lmtas.lmco.com> <38B55928.8A0EAB06@quadruscorp.com> <2000Feb24.122253.1@eisner> <897k3c$qgg$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <38B80EBA.721830@flash.net> X-Priority: 3 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2919.6600 X-Complaints-To: abuse@demon.net X-Trace: news.demon.co.uk 952461466 nnrp-12:12261 NO-IDENT dimmick.demon.co.uk:212.229.189.225 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 2000-03-07T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: "Gary Scott" 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 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.