Re: Desirability of C++

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On Mon, 1 May 2000, Gautier wrote:
> Hyman Rosen:
> > While C++ syntax can sometimes be abysmal, I am 100% convinced that the
> > main reason for the lack of Ada's popularity is its Pascal-derived syntax.

Hard to believe. Turbo Pascal/Delphi, as Gautier points out, and even VB 
uses BEGIN/END. 

> > Even after many attempts, I still can't look at a chunk of Ada code
> > without my eyes swimming from the mass of undifferentiated text. 

A colorizing editor might help here. I use Emacs, but I believe VIM also 
has this ability.

I am actually somewhat in agreement with your complaint, and I wish there 
were more available operators in Ada, and that arrays used "[]", etc. 
Still, superficial syntactic annoyances are really not that important.

> Hum... and how do you explain the huge popularity of Turbo/Borland Pascal ?
> The lack of Ada's popularity until the past few years (thanks to GNAT) is
> rather due to the refrigerating effect of the policy the DoD had - IMHO.

This sounds closer to the truth...

> And the fact Ada came too early for the 16-bit, low Mhz personal computer wave.

And this even more so. Masses of programmers were trained on small
machines which had C compilers but not Ada compilers. When the machines 
got bigger they probably found it easier to switch to C++ which was a
fairly small language in the mid-1980s.

> About syntax: I think it's rather a question of personal taste and practice.
> 
> Is it worse to have the eye swimming from an ill-formatted over-uppercased
> Ada source 

I think Hyman's complaint has more to do with the fact that
"punctuation" in Ada looks like regular text, than with formatting issues,
and that his eyes would swim from well formatted code too. As I said, 
colorization or even bold/italics/... would help a lot with this issue.

-- Brian