From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,5dadc78d94298b82 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-02-11 15:34:03 PST Path: supernews.google.com!sn-xit-03!supernews.com!nntp.cs.ubc.ca!newsfeed.direct.ca!look.ca!newsfeed1.earthlink.net!newsfeed2.earthlink.net!newsfeed.earthlink.net!news.mindspring.net!not-for-mail From: "Robert Deininger" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Misconception about Ada? Date: 11 Feb 2001 18:30:30 -0500 Organization: MindSpring Enterprises Message-ID: References: <3A872501.1186F238@uol.com.br> NNTP-Posting-Host: a5.f7.19.ce Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Server-Date: 11 Feb 2001 23:30:12 GMT X-Mailer: Cyberdog/2.0 X-News-Servers: news.mindspring.com X-Newsgroups-TO: nntp://news.mindspring.com/comp.lang.ada Xref: supernews.google.com comp.lang.ada:5132 Date: 2001-02-11T23:30:12+00:00 List-Id: On Sun, Feb 11, 2001 6:49 PM, Cesar Rabak wrote: >Eric Raymon is writting a book on-line and has a particular paragraph >which seems to me execessively perfunctory about Ada. > >Do you think it is worth to discuss this with him? > >http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/taoup/chapter3.html > >The pertaining part is "Why Not C?" I take it this is the part you don't like: "The arguments against C and C++ apply with equal force to other conventional compiled languages such as Pascal, Ada, Algol, PL/I, Fortran, and compiled Basic dialects. Despite occasional heroic efforts such as the Eiffel/Sather family, the differences between conventional languages remain superficial when set against their basic design decision to leave memory management to the programmer. None is clearly superior to C/C++, and none are in significant use in the Unix or Windows worlds. Accordingly we will not survey them here." Knowing nothing more about this author than I learned by skimming the chapter, I suspect it would be a waste of time to discuss Ada with him. I guess he doesn't have a clue about Ada, but he thinks he knows quite a bit. Throwing all these languages in the same basket is silly. I guess Ada is not suitable for the sort of programming he cares about: "In 1996 a widely-reported and plausible estimate of community sizes held that for every Python hacker there were five Tcl hackers and twelve Perl hackers. " Speak up, Ada hackers! --------------------------- Robert Deininger rdeininger@mindspring.com