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From: softeng3456@netscape.net (soft-eng)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.advocacy,comp.object,comp.lang.ada,misc.misc
Subject: Re: the Ada mandate,
 and why it collapsed and died (was): 64 bit  addressing and OOP
Date: 23 Apr 2003 05:39:04 -0700
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Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.java.advocacy:62544 comp.object:61659
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Date: 2003-04-23T12:39:04+00:00
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"Chad R. Meiners" <crmeiners@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<b84gku$2i5l$1@msunews.cl.msu.edu>...
> "soft-eng" <softeng3456@netscape.net> wrote in message
> news:9fa75d42.0304221126.7112b7d5@posting.google.com...
> > Take something trivial, e.g. string slicing.
> > Not a terribly useful feature, but not entirely
> > useless either.
> 
> Array slicing is a wonderfully useful feature.  I use this feature in almost
> every program of mine.

Any itsy-bitsy feature *will* be found wonderful by somebody.

That's exactly the problem -- because there were so
many itsy-bitsy features in Ada, a novice needed to
learn all of them, because somebody somewhere finds
it useful and it will be found in real-world code.

Having tons of features in auxiliary libraries
in the "C" style make mastering the language much simpler
by chunking the task of learning without complicating
the syntax issues.

But having them directly in the language itself makes
just learning the basic language unnecessarily harder.
And the trouble is, you don't get anything really
worthwhile out of all the time you spend on
mastering all that syntax.  You would have
been better off mastering concepts instead.