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From: carroll@cis.ohio-state.edu (Mark Carroll)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Generics - Difference between ADA and Modula--3
Date: 5 Feb 2001 20:51:30 GMT
Organization: Ohio State Univ., Dept of Computer and Information Science
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In article <95eumd$8i41@news.cis.okstate.edu>,
David Starner <dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org> wrote:
(snip)
>Like what? I can give a short overview, but I'm not sure it will

I don't yet know enough about Ada to say. (-:

>be helpful.

>Modula-3 is designed to be garbage-collected, and provides controls to
>handle stuff without garbage-collections.
>Ada is designed so that it is possible to garbage-collect it. It's
>only garbage-collected on the JVM's, which don't give you any control.
>If there was another GC implementation, any garbage-collection control
>would be implementation-specific.

That's a pity. So, there aren't any Ada compilers that compile to
native code and offer a runtime with decent GC? Are there any other
special tricks used to make memory management easier than, say, a C
programmer might expect?

>Ada designers made perfectly type-safe generics. Modula-3 designers looked
>at Ada generics and C++ templates and decided the Ada generics were too much
>of a PITA and went with a C++-style design that catches mistakes at link-time
>rather than compile-time.

I'm not a big fan of how Modula-3's generics work, certainly. 

(snip)
>I don't believe Modula-3 has operator overloading.

It doesn't, except for the obvious built-in things like '+'.

>Modula-3 compares types by value instead of by name, and introduces brands
>to compensate for that.

Yes. I prefer name-equivalence personally, so I brand a lot.

(snip interesting stuff)

Thanks! That was indeed helpful, believe it or not. (-:

-- Mark