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From: Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>
Subject: Re: Ragged Array Proposal
Date: 1999/09/27
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1999-09-27T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

On 27 Sep 1999, Hyman Rosen wrote:
> Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> writes:
> > "more complicated" /= longer
> > 
> > Actually the C version is quite a bit more complex, because of
> > the rather peculiar rules about whether string pointers are
> > or are not constants, and about the issue of whether
> > "abc" == "abc" (in general of course the answer in C is no)
> > 
> > It looks simpler, but that can hide a lot of sins :-)
> 
> Like I said, I don't have proper Ada intuition. Frankly, for all its
> supposed readability, looking at Ada code makes my eyes and my brain
> swim. I think it's because Ada uses too many words and not enough
> symbols. I've felt that way ever since I first saw Ada code lo those
> many years ago, and I still feel so today.

That's funny. I actually agree that Ada is a bit wordy for my tastes, and
would prefer a few more symbols, but I find that reading C++ "makes my
eyes and brain swim" because of its overuse of symbols, weird overloadings 
of words like "static", and generally bad syntax. I find well written Ada
far easier to read than C or C++, even though I write much more C family 
language code! To be fair, C++ is the way it is largely to remain
compatible with C; reading the examples in the "C++ resyntaxed" paper
(where C++ gets a slightly more Pascalish syntax) was much easier to me.

I guess you can only please some of the people some of the time...

-- Brian