Re: Advice on selling Ada to a C shop

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

On 23 Cze, 21:57, "Peter C. Chapin" <pcc482...@gmail.com> wrote:

> My understanding is that Ada is primarily a "systems" programming language. It
> supports embedded programming, real time programming, and other "low level"
> applications. People writing such programs are not particularly concerned
> about GUI packages. Well... I can't speak for everyone, but I'm using Ada in
> an embedded application and I'm certainly not worried about the lack of GUI
> support.

The reason for why GUI is not (and will not be) in the Ada standard
library is the same as in C++ - there are too many ways to do it and
the cost of prototyping is too high to attract attention of
individuals who are usually *volunteers* in standardization efforts.
Especially when the already acceptable solution is to live with
existing third-party library or libraries.

> I wasn't involved in the discussion that lead to the decision to include
> conditional expressions in Ada

Again similarity to C++ - conditional expressions are *essential* for
initializing constants. Without them programmers are forced to either
use modifiable variables where constants would be more natural (this
is unsafe) or to write local or helper functions, which destroys the
locality of reference for code entities (this is less readable ->
unsafe).

I'm glad that Ada is going to adopt them.

--
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.inspirel.com

YAMI4 - Messaging Solution for Distributed Systems
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