Re: Any research putting c above ada?

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

In article <5k67fl$eit@mtinsc03.worldnet.att.net> Craig Franck <clfranck@worldnet.att.net> writes:

  > Oh, sure; why should they care if phone service is disrupted? I 
  > think you can argue which snippet is more readable. I think Ada
  > may be a tad too verbose, and C a smidgeon too terse.

   And did Ma Bell ever catch it for those major outages a few years
ago!  (In fact several people on their way to an Ada 9X requirements
meeting in Portsmouth, England have fond memories of spending seven
hours or so on the ground because of one failure.)  But I digress...

   A better Ada statement of swap would be:

   procedure Swap (A,B : in out Integer) is
     Temp : Integer := A;
   begin A := B; B := Temp; end Swap;

   I'm not going to count characters, but that feels less verbose than
the C not more.

  > Anyway, is AND more readable than &&? Who knows.

   I do, lots of us do, and yes, it is. (But "and" in lower case is
more readable.)  There are some areas where Ada went with conventional
syntax, such as the arithmetic operations, and others where it can be
oververbose.  But in general, the most easily readable option was the
one chosen.  You have no concept how much Sturm and Drang went on
about the notation for types derived from tagged types which do not
add state.  The final answer was a compromise:

   type Bar is new Foo with null record;

   Three keywords to indicate that the type could have been extended,
but wasn't.  There needs to be something, and a lot of us wanted "with
null;" instead of "with null record;" but that's what compromise is
about.  (And two keywords is the minimum.  The first tells you it is
an extensible type, the second that it wasn't extended here.  If you
fold that together, it is tougher to parse as you read.)


					Robert I. Eachus

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					Robert I. Eachus

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