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From: eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)
Subject: Re: Programming language vote - results
Date: 1997/10/17
Message-ID: <EACHUS.97Oct17190351@spectre.mitre.org>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 281355421
References: <343fbb5a.0@news.iprolink.ch> <343FD05C.8986A557@flash.net>
 <34428914.2D71D0F@ibm.net> <01bcd87f$7fefcf00$25a43a91@basil.omroep.nl>
 <34458CE3.507C@dynamite.com.au>
Organization: The Mitre Corp., Bedford, MA.
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.apl,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++
Date: 1997-10-17T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <34458CE3.507C@dynamite.com.au> Alan E & Carmel J Brain <aebrain@dynamite.com.au> writes:

 > I guess I'm probably the only contributor here whose preferred language
 > is Ada-95, and who has used a lot of APL in the commercial environment.

   Guess again...  APL Is great for what it does, and you can do
things in it, in a few lines, that take doezens or hundreds of pages
in other languages.  However, it takes just as long to understand the
code.  I even have code prototyped as a dozen lines of APL that
eventually became about 25 pages of well structured, well commented
Ada 83.  (The Ada, of course, runs much faster, and that is not
something I could have done in APL--I had to write a sparse matrix
package tuned to the particular application.)

   In any case I wouldn't make any changes in either version without
several weeks to refamiliarize myself with the algorithms and code.
(And, yes the documentation outbulks by far either source version.)

   But I couldn't have written the code without the freedom granted by
Ada, APL, and Lisp to redefine the things at one level, and work with
the higher level abstract ONLY in other parts of the code.

 
--

					Robert I. Eachus

with Standard_Disclaimer;
use  Standard_Disclaimer;
function Message (Text: in Clever_Ideas) return Better_Ideas is...