Re: next "big" language?? (disagree)

[The Amorphous Mass <robinson@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>]

On 4 Jun 1996, Peter Hermann wrote:

> Kurt Johmann (johmann@moal.com) wrote:
> : Programming languages are almost completely subjective, because the only
> 
> I strongly disagree

  Why?  If they were not subjective then programming languages would all 
be very similar.

> : minds apparently like that kind of enforced discipline (masochist types,
> : perhaps :-), but to my mind it was a build-your-own-straightjacket-and-
> : wear-it kind of approach to programming.
> 
[snip]
> I can see no advantage to allow e.g. a memory overwrite error,
> by accident, or, e.g. an outside range value at run time or
> a wrong subroutine call due to bad parameter profile.
> When I decide, as a programmer, that a peculiar type or
> variable may have a value in the range from 1 to 9, can you please
> explain me why it should be useful to assign a value of 10 or
> 4711 or -1234?
> 
> btw: Ada is the first useful (and even readable) Pascal
>      with free compilers running on any platform

  _Any_ platform?  You mean I could fire it up on my little 68020-powered 
Mac with its expansive 4MB of memory and galactic 80MB hard drive and 
enjoy the full benefits of Ada's rich set of features?  Or is there a 
cost to having a language that does everything, an environment that does 
everything, and a compiler that does everything?
  My C compiler takes up 5.1MB on my hard drive and runs in just under 1MB 
of RAM.  That's with full support for the Mac Toolbox and an 
object-oriented extention to the language, plus a class library for the 
Mac GUI and a nice debugger.  Are there any Ada compilers that can say that?
  I think you're assuming that everyone is deveoping a huge, complex 
project with 100 teams of 100 programmers each working on mainframes with 
350MHz Alphas and 256MB of RAM (OK, I'm exaggerating a little :-).  Those 
of us lone programmers who put speed and space at a premium are willing 
to go hunting for stray pointers as a necessary cost of using a small, 
fast language.
  Besides, Ada is not the only big, safe, feature-laden, industrial-strength 
language out there.  So obviously there are people who would agree 
wholeheartedly with your argument, but who would then disagree that Ada 
would be the best language to use for "professional" programming.  The 
nature of that disagreement is, of course, subjective.

- James                    "Good candidates for exceptions are situations
james-robinson@uiowa.edu   that do not occur under normal circumstances."
                                                        -- Kevin J. Hopps