Re: ADA and Pascal SUCK, C,C++, and Java are the only languages you need!!

["Marin David Condic, 561.796.8997, M/S 731-96" <condicma@PWFL.COM>]

Mike Copeland <mrcope@PRIMENET.COM> writes:
>  1. The portability issue.  C/C++ are basically portable across
>platforms, and this is an extremely important issue to corporate
>thinking.  It's more important to the executives/decision makers of most
>companies that their key applications can be moved to other vendor's
>hardware when financial issues force such switches, than to have
>implementation languages which their programmers like and find easy to
>learn.
    This seems to be misinformation. C was originally invented as a
    systems programming language and for years had no standard at all.
    Implementations varied quite a bit and many of the things that
    were legal to do (and frequently done) were notoriously
    non-portable. From practical experience in porting C programs
    (albeit, not in the last couple of years) I can attest to the fact
    that it is far more work than porting an equivalent Ada program.
    If anybody considers C (and by extension C++) to be "portable"
    then they ought to be extremely impressed with Ada since it is
    much more rigorous in its language definition and designed with
    portability as one of its major objectives.

>  2. Pascal and Ada (which is often called a highly enriched Pascal)
>weren't designed as application development vehicles - whereas C/C++
>were.  Pascal was invented as a teaching tool for structured and module
<snip>
    As stated above. C was developed as a systems programming language
    which has dramatically different requirements from an applications
    programming language. Arguably, C++ might have been oriented more
    towards applications, but it's roots in C means its dragging along
    many characteristics aimed at systems programming.

>   Ada, OTOH, was designed for implementation of secure and fail-safe
>systems for the Government.  It was based on Pascal concepts (very strong
>typing, modularity, consistency, etc.), but was taken much farther than
>was useful to the general world.  Learning Ada should be considered an
>educational experience, at best, because no one uses it.  And I agree
>it's very hard to learn and work with, even coming from a Pascal
>background.  Nonetheless, Ada provides some interesting and useful things
>for any serious programmer to think about and use in his/her work.
>
    I'd beg to differ on the "no one uses it" part of this statement.
    While it seems obvious that other languages may be more widely
    used than Ada, it is not as if there is no Ada programming going
    on in the real world. It is a non-trivial market and I don't
    expect it will disappear any time soon.

    Hard to learn? Sure - there's features in the language that deal
    with difficult concepts, such as multitasking/concurrency,
    numerical analysis, et cetera. When you deal with difficult
    concepts, you're going to find it difficult to learn. But I teach
    an "Intro to Ada" in-house course aimed at engineers with a
    familarity with other languages and it's not hard at all getting
    them up to speed with a Pascal-like subset of the features.

    The only area that gets difficult is teaching the use of the
    generic I/O packages. (Forces you to discuss generic instantiation
    early on and this always seems to be a difficult concept to get
    across until some experience with the language is gained.) Text_IO
    can be turgid, but by sticking to Put_Line and 'Image (EVERYTHING
    ought to have a 'Image attribute!!!) you can get folks rolling on
    basic terminal I/O without any more complication than trying to
    teach the "printf" calls (and all its variants) in C.

    The thing that bothers me about the "Hard To Learn" falacy is that
    when you dig into it a little you tend to discover that it is a
    variation of "It's not what I already know, so it's 'Hard To
    Learn'" or "I'm used to a language that has no advanced features
    so I find it 'Hard To Learn' a language that does." You can learn
    the Pascal-like subset of Ada with no more difficulty than you
    would experience learning Pascal - and all learning requires
    effort and therefore, by definition is not going to be easy. (If
    it were easy, everybody would do it.) When you've mastered the
    Pascal-like subset, you can gradually add on features just like
    you learned the more advanced, arcane, dark features of C. And no
    language design is *ever* going to make concepts like concurrency
    "simple" so you're going to have to bite the bullet and learn the
    theory behind the advanced features before the features themselves
    are going to make sense.

    Language wars are futile, like most wars are, so we shouldn't
    ought to start one. I don't mean to give the impression that
    there's something wrong with preferring one language over another.
    There's nothing wrong with saying "This is the language I know and
    am comfortable with, so that's what I use to get my job done." But
    in criticizing a language, there needs to be some emphasis on
    avoiding vague generalities or subjective judgments.

    MDC

Marin David Condic, Senior Computer Engineer     Voice:     561.796.8997
Pratt & Whitney GESP, M/S 731-96, P.O.B. 109600  Fax:       561.796.4669
West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600                  Internet:  CONDICMA@PWFL.COM
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