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From: "Marin David Condic, 407.796.8997, M/S 731-93" <condicma@PWFL.COM>
Subject: Re: Two ideas for the next Ada Standard
Date: 1996/09/06
Message-ID: <96090615545364@psavax.pwfl.com>#1/1
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sender: Ada programming language <INFO-ADA@LISTSERV.NODAK.EDU>
comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU
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newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
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Date: 1996-09-06T00:00:00+00:00
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Jon S Anthony <jsa@organon.com> writes:
>Wow.  Something is _really_ screwy with my address.  I'm certainly
>not at "americant.edu" - I'm at where my sig. sez.  I wonder what the
>
    Sorry about that, but this is a direct cut from the INFO-ADA
    listserver that sends the stuff my way:
From:    Jon S Anthony <jsa@ALEXANDRIA.AMERICAN.EDU>


>what capability they are trying to provide.  I mean this at the level
>of the language - not "just" the programmer's view trying to write a
>hunk of code.  Once you have that, it is fairly easy to move around.
>"Oh language X solves that problem with A, B, and C.  Interesting.
>Language Y solves it with R and Q."  The only place where you may hit
>a speed bump with this is when moving between procedural and
>declarative languages.
>
    As you observe, you can get a couple of different views on the
    same problem (trying to shift from one language's "paradigm"
    (ugggh!) to another) C syntax/semantics tends to lead the
    programmer towards thinking of solutions involving pointers to
    everything, arrays/counters that start at zero, returned function
    codes for determining success/failure, etc. They get frustrated
    when they move to a language like Ada which may certainly allow
    you to do all of the same things, but doesn't really want you to.
    ("Yes you _can_ pass strings to subroutines by declaring an access
    type, etc., but why would you _want_ to???")

    Another class of problem is where the language itself is so
    dramatically different that it's damned near impossible to get
    your brain wrapped around the way it works. I started with Pascal,
    Fortran and other "normal" languages. The first time I encountered
    Lisp, it about choked me to death! (There are two kinds of
    programming languages in the world: Lisp and Everything-Else)
    Things like RPG-II were equally strange and difficult to find any
    "reference points" in. In some ways, this was better because you
    *knew* from the get-go that you were going to have to discard all
    of your pre-conceived notions about how to write a program and
    learn to work *with* the new language, rather than trying to
    bludgeon it into doing what you were used to.

    MDC

Marin David Condic, Senior Computer Engineer    ATT:        407.796.8997
M/S 731-96                                      Technet:    796.8997
Pratt & Whitney, GESP                           Fax:        407.796.4669
P.O. Box 109600                                 Internet:   CONDICMA@PWFL.COM
West Palm Beach, FL 33410-9600                  Internet:   CONDIC@FLINET.COM
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