Re: A Pascal Subset of Ada (was: Why Ada is Failing Socially)

[neeri@iis.ethz.ch (Matthias Ulrich Neeracher)]

In article <1991Jun27.235212.21155@netcom.COM> jls@netcom.COM (Jim Showalter) writes:
>neeri@iis.ethz.ch (Matthias Ulrich Neeracher) writes:
>
>>In article <1991Jun27.074515.9755@netcom.COM> jls@netcom.COM (Jim Showalter) writes:
>>>Modula-2 was an interesting way-station on the road to software engineering
>>>languages, but not an end in itself.
>
>>I wish a similiar conclusion would arise from the Ada experience.
>
>Perhaps it will--as soon as something better comes along. What do you suggest?

[Sorry for wasting the bandwidth of this group for discussion on other languages]

I don't think there is currently a language that handles everything Ada does as
well. On the other hand, I believe there are several languages (Eiffel for
instance) that handle certain aspects of Ada better. There are also some
languages that can't be matched by Ada for special tasks. I don't hope there's
anyone who would use Ada for typical tasks suited for Scheme, Prolog, ML, or
PostScript (would you rather use Ada as a page description language ?-). I'm
quite sure that by the year 2000, a language will exist that is simply better
than Ada. But in the meantime, it seems reasonable to use the best that is
available :-) 
   But what I'm afraid of is that Ada will stay around long after it is found
to be inadequate, that it will become the FORTRAN of the 3rd millenium.

Matthias

-----
Matthias Neeracher                                      neeri@iis.ethz.ch
   "These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can 
    even aspire to crudeness." -- William Gibson, _Johnny Mnemonic_