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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: fd6dd,c78177ec2e61f4ac X-Google-Attributes: gidfd6dd,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,c78177ec2e61f4ac X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff) Subject: Re: ada and robots Date: 1997/06/18 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 249461436 References: <338CDA96.53EA@halcyon.com> <33A5D644.37A3@epix.net> <33A7427F.6646@epix.net> Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Newsgroups: comp.robotics.misc,comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-06-18T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <33A7427F.6646@epix.net>, Matthew S. Whiting wrote: >... I'm not sure how to reconcile the disagreement >between Jon and Robert with respect to whether 1.5 of the points made >were legitimate or not, ... Well, I guess I was being generous. The ".5" was for "variable length argument lists". I was admitting that they can be a nice convenience. However, I must say that I completely reject the idea that C in particular is "better" in this regard, since it sacrifices type checking for variable length argument lists. And since you can conveniently concatenate strings for output, the printf example is not compelling. My position is: it would be nice (a little bit) to have var-length arg lists, but only if the language did them in a type-safe way. Anyway, I thought the issue was whether Ada can deal with low-level programming such as in device drivers. And the printf example, and var-length arg lists, have nothing in particular to do with that. The "1" was for "lack of bindings", and I still agree with your colleague that this is a problem in choosing Ada. On the other hand, it's not *that* bad -- Ada 95 has quite nice facilities for interfacing to C. >... but this provides a good reason for me to study >Ada a little more to make my own judgement. Good idea. I'd be interested in hearing what the outcome is -- e.g. whether or not your colleague ever changes his mind, or comes up with a real example of device-driver-ish code that can't be written easily in Ada. - Bob