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From: Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>
Subject: Re: Depending on passing mechanism
Date: 1997/10/19
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971019135319.3201C-100000@shell5.ba.best.com>#1/1
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-10-19T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


On Sat, 18 Oct 1997, Matthew Heaney wrote:
> Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> wrote:
> 
> Brian, to Henry:
> 
> >You post elsewhere that Ada's flaws are well known everywhere but inside 
> >the Ada community. I think the opposite is true, lots of "flaws" in Ada, 
> >including those mentioned in your papers, are discussed on c.l.a., but the 
> >knowledge of Ada elsewhere is simplistic (ADA is kitchen sink language 
> >designed by DOD committee) and I've rarely seen useful criticisms from 
> >"outside", except for those of Ada-83 tasking. I still haven't found a 
> >widely useful language without serious flaws. The main competitor for Ada 
> >in its class is C++, and I prefer Ada. 
> 
> Matt, to Brain and Henry:

Matt, 
	I'm agnostic about the seriousness of this "flaw". Jon Anthony 
mentioned that he thought it was pretty bad (even still in Ada 95), so
I'm waiting for his arguments. I haven't written code yet where the 
limited view stuff you mention would not be an acceptable workaround, 
but I am working on different things,

	The Ada flaws in Henry Bakers papers that I personally find
just as annoying in (the non-concurrent subset of ) Ada 95 are 

	(1) No out mode in functions
	(2) No ability to interleave public and private parts in 
	    package specs
	(3) No mutually recursion across package specs
	(4) No "downward funargs" (fixed in GNAT with Unrestricted_Access 
	    attribute) 

and even though Henry Baker didn't mention it, I wish there was some form 
of automatic instantiation for Ada generics a la Shen and Cormack. 

OTOH, the existence of Ada.Interfaces packages is way more important than 
any of these "flaws". I'm pragmatic too.

-- Brian