Re: Newbie question about generic linked list tasks

[eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)]

In article <farrell.780558777@coral.cs.jcu.edu.au> farrell@coral.cs.jcu.edu.au (John Farrell) writes:

 >   Blagh. I have been writing Gofer (a functional language) for 2
 > years now for my everyday needs and for this class, and I have been
 > writing Ada for say 3 months purely for this class. I can find
 > ~2500 lines of Gofer and ~1400 lines of Ada. Considering how much I
 > have achieved in Gofer and how little I have achieved in Ada, I
 > have to have serious doubts about the contribution of Ada to
 > software engineering! I have not previously been an evangelistic
 > functional programmer, but Ada is changing my mind :-).

    The goals of Ada 83 were to reduce maintenance costs as much as
possible without increasing the cost to create large applications.
The result is that small applications are often larger in Ada 83.
(We used to joke that the minimum size of an example was three pages.)
I've gotten much better at using the language, and I can often create
fairly sophisticated applications with only a few hundred lines of new
code, but one liners are still pretty rare.  (Although I came close
with that Fibonacci example.)

    Ada 9X will be a lot better in part because a lot more of the
library packages needed will be in the standard, and even better when
we get some public domain class libraries out.

    Ada will always have a long learning curve to become productive,
as will any large toolset.  It is always possible to build all your
own tools, and you should build some to understand how it is done.
But the best approach will always be to learn and use the available
toolsets.  As those grow, the time to learn them also grows.  Ada does
make it possible to learn to use toolsets more quickly, but the time
required is never zero.
--

					Robert I. Eachus

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function Message (Text: in Clever_Ideas) return Better_Ideas is...