Re: Ada to C++ translator?

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

On Wed, 21 Feb 2001, Ken Garlington wrote:
> To paraphrase my response to another claim that efficient tasking has been
> universally true since 1889 (e-mail me if you want the identity of "X", "Y"
> and "Z").

Wow, you've been hacking Ada WAY longer than I have ;-). 

[...snip...]
> As I've noted before, this sort of attitude makes it very difficult for me
> to sell Ada. From the same post:
> 
> "There's plenty of blame to go around with respect to Ada...
> 
> "6. And the one that got us here: Legitimate issues with the Ada language
> are
> attacked with religious zeal instead of reason. Compare Ada/Eiffel
> discussions with C/C++ discussions, then look at their penetration into the
> software engineering community. I think you'll see a correlation....

What I usually get annoyed by is the way that every defect of Ada is 
defended by BS like "Ada favors the reader over the writer, we don't care 
about the writer of code." That all sounds very good, but in the absence
of anything besides someone's opinion on what contributes to readability
and what detracts from it, it's just hot air. 

> On the projects where we used C++, I don't believe we've ever had anyone say
> we weren't "C++ enough" because we constrained the use of templates. Quite
> the contrary - there's an active effort to develop a standard C++ subset
> (EC++) for use in certain domains, without any fear of being arrested by the
> "C++ police" for subsetting the language. Why would someone want to use a
> language with a built-in Inquisition?

I don't understand your complaint in the context of "now", since there are 
Ada subsets (like SPARK) and I don't expect a Spanish Inquisition... 
uh-oh :-)

-- Brian