From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,79bbf7e359159d0d X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-04-09 21:30:06 PST Path: supernews.google.com!sn-xit-03!supernews.com!logbridge.uoregon.edu!newsfeed.mesh.ad.jp!sjc-peer.news.verio.net!news.verio.net!sea-read.news.verio.net.POSTED!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada From: Brian Rogoff Subject: Re: newbie can't get exceptions to work! In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: <25%y6.2364$jz.201607@www.newsranger.com> <3ACDB29E.45B91316@earthlink.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 04:26:54 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 206.184.139.136 X-Complaints-To: abuse@verio.net X-Trace: sea-read.news.verio.net 986876814 206.184.139.136 (Tue, 10 Apr 2001 04:26:54 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 04:26:54 GMT Organization: Verio Xref: supernews.google.com comp.lang.ada:6695 Date: 2001-04-10T04:26:54+00:00 List-Id: On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Robert A Duff wrote: > Brian Rogoff writes: > > > On Sat, 7 Apr 2001, Robert A Duff wrote: > > > I suspect that to make a *popular* language these days, you have to make > > > it look like C (yuck), > > > > Python isn't popular? Visual Basic? > > Granted. And Lisp and Smalltalk are still popular in in their niche. > And Perl is popular, though I find it an abomination. > > > I don't think you need to go quite as far as Cyclone. Dump "begin end" and > > use "{ }". > > Well, it's not just "begin end", but also "if ... end if", "procedure P > ... end P", and so forth. > > Anyway, I like being able to see what the "end" is end of (as in "end > if" or "end P"), so I don't like just "}". Right, I responded in another post that this is a good thing. If we keep Ada's approach to semi-colons then we can easily keep those trailing names. Incidentally, I hate the optional {} on if rule of C, and I always found Ada's semi-colon as terminator rule easy. I realize that's another flamewar, but I'm just shooting out an opinion. > >... If you keep the procedure/function distinction, use shorter > > names. > > I would call them both "procedure". I find the C syntax for functions > very unreadable -- it's hard to tell a procedure header from an > expression. I agree, but since you proposed going C like, let's go for shorter names, like proc. And no "returns" either, let's regress to a Pascalish :. > >... Use [] for arrays. > > Agreed. > > > Use Pascal notation for pointers. > > Yes! I hate ".all", and I long for the days of "X^.Y". Phew. Good that we're getting some agreement. > >... Provide some > > shortcut operators like C. > > OK, but I might decide to call it Incr(X) instead X++. OK. I think C folks will whine though. I have a generic package for these in Ada, and I use Incr and Decr. > >... Keep Ada's modes. OK, so the language may look > > a bit different from Ada syntactically but I think it could stay in the > > spirit of Ada semantically. > > > > > and you have to have enough money to generate large amounts of hype. Sigh. > > > > It's not clear to me that that approach is such a win. There is something > > of a Java backlash too. > > If I could design a language that inspired as much backlash as Java, > I would consider myself quite a success! :-). I think if the language could generate code as good as C, and be at a significantly higher level, you might get some interest. IMO, the important thing is to have a good compiler that runs on lots of machines. A simple command line job, no point in wasting time with an IDE until enough folks are interested. Anyways, Python, Tcl, Ruby and others didn't have large marketing budgets. -- Brian