Re: smalltalk vs. Ada

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

AFAIK, Smalltalk pretty much restricts you to doing OOP even if that isn't
the best way to build a particular part of the system. Ada, OTOH, is more
"general purpose" and will let you design/implement with traditional
functional techniques (or pure spagetti-code ala "The Good Old Days" if you
like! :-) when necessary, yet still support all of the object creation you
may want.

There are practical concerns as well. You'd want to ask about the quality of
Ada & Smalltalk implementations, the target systems for which they are
available, tools, cost, etc. I've never done anything real with Smalltalk,
so I couldn't advise you on that aspect. I can say that Ada is available
from a number of sources with different qualities for each implementation,
so you have some choices available depending on your intended use. There are
a large number of target computers for which Ada can be had. There are also
a large number of tools available for working with Ada that are in general
pretty good. (Yes, I complain because they're not always everything I want
them to be, but in fairness, there really are a lot of things out there to
support Ada development.) I'd suspect that Smalltalk will be a bit more
obscure than Ada and (based on complaints heard here often) if you have a
hard time finding Ada programmers, you'll have an even harder time finding
Smalltalk programmers. If you need long-term future support, etc., Ada is
probably in a better position than Smalltalk.

Hope this helps.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Rod Weston" <rod_weston@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:f7ce0059.0106071420.2f38d37a@posting.google.com...
> Still investigating OOP languages.  I'm quite impressed with Ada, from
> what I've seen and read so far, but now want to turn my attention to
> smalltalk.  Any ideas on how Ada and smalltalk compare?  Are there any
> other OOP languages worth looking at?