Re: RE: Ada The Best Language?

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <3B5FDFA0@MailAndNews.com>, Vinzent Hoefler says...
>
>Original Message From Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@icn.siemens.de>
>
>>What is the superior feature that justifies the creation of C++ at
>>a time where Ada were already long available ?
>
>Kind of backwards compatibility, I guess. It looks like C.

That's close. I believe the original reason was an attempt to drag C coders
kicking and screaming into the modern era. So they created an OO language that
used C syntax, still understood some C sources, and precompiled down to C
(originally).

For the most part, I'd say its been successful. The general public does seem to
slowly be getting weaned from those crappy old software practices they used to
love. You don't hear much serious argument *against* strong typing anymore, like
you used to 5 years ago. All the well-reasoned design decisions of Ada are being
slowly accepted, and these days the firmest ground a troll can find to stand on
is roughly "yeah, Ada's good, but C++ is nearly there". 

It would still have been beter if someone could somehow have made all those C
coders go "cold turkey" and use something better founded, like Ada. But the DoD
actually tried to do that, and failed. The most workable poicly is probably just
to chip them off slowly.

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