Re: 'Cyclone', a safer C--reinventing the wheel

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@bpr.best.vwh.net>]

On Thu, 22 Nov 2001, Mark Lundquist wrote:
> "Brian Rogoff" <bpr@bpr.best.vwh.net> wrote in message
> news:Pine.BSF.4.10.10111212226350.12326-100000@bpr.best.vwh.net...
> 
> > Serendipity being what it
> > is, I'll include a post that I got today from the Caml mailing list by
> > someone who knows better about which wheels are being reinvented, and why
> > they don't "just use Ada"
> 
> (You mean, "just use OCaml"...)

:-)

While I like OCaml and use it a lot, there are quite a few tasks for which
Ada is just a better language. Still, I think one could design an Ada-like 
language which borrowed some features from high level languages without
compromising any of its advantages. Cyclone shows how, though it is stuck 
with a C base. 

One thing that's a bit irritating about Cyclone is that it only has genericity 
for reference types. One of the interesting aspects of Cyclone which we
may see in Ada 200X (well Tucker Taft said we may anyways) is region based
memory management. Then I'll post a "Ada 0X : reinventing the wheel" message :-)

> That _was_ very funny!

I bet you really liked the post that started the thread where C is referred to 
as a toxic piece of garbage. And my post was called extreme!

-- Brian

PS : I really have nothing against C, it's just unfortunate that a
glorified portable assembler became the dominant application programming
language. So many wasted man-hours....