Re: newbie can't get exceptions to work!

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

On Wed, 11 Apr 2001, Robert A Duff wrote:
> Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> writes:
> 
> > 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 :.
> 
> Well, I didn't really "propose" going C like.  I was merely griping that
> one might be *forced* to go C like in order to gain popularity. 

Yes you're right. I realize you weren't completely serious, but I think
that point (about syntax) has been made many times, and even though I 
generally like Ada syntax much better I thought I'd argue the C side. 

> I realize it's an exageration.  And of course, as you point out, one might
> be able to borrow some *good* ideas from C, too.

Truthfully, I don't know that there is that much good to borrow from
C. Pascal and the other Wirth languages already used [] for arrays. Ada 
got the ability to get a pointer to a local variable, and did it better
than C IMO. 

As Lauernt Guerby rightly observed, {} versus begin-end is mostly a
non-issue. A huge number of programmers used to C derived syntaxes are
used to that choice, and find it readable. By adding a semi-colon after
the closing brace we can get back the nice feature of Ada which matches
opening names (and I admit this is a very nice feature, which I emulate in 
C/C++/Java/OCaml/... with comments :-( ). So, I think it's possible to get 
much closer to C without losing fundamentally good Ada features. 

As far as [] goes, sure, my degrees are in mathematics, I'm very well
aware that you can view an array as a (partial) function, but as a
programmer, I just don't see things that way. If I want a very formal
mathematical language I wouldn't use Ada at all, I'd use Haskell or Clean. 

> > OK. I think C folks will whine though. I have a generic package for these
> > in Ada, and I use Incr and Decr. 
> 
> But you unfortunately have to clutter the code with instantiations,
> which negates the benfit, IMHO.

Absolutely right. So one good idea we could steal from (gasp! shudder!) C++ 
is automatic instantiation of generics. There was a paper on this in
Tri-Ada 91, and one of the authors (Shen) has a PhD thesis exploring this
idea in more detail.

> > Anyways, Python, Tcl, Ruby and others didn't have large marketing budgets. 
> 
> Granted.

The question then, if you want to go the cheapo route, is to find a group
of programmers whose needs aren't being well met by the available choices. 
I always think of Ada as a low level language (despite the weird VHLL
description) used for embedded, real-time, and systems programming work. 
Is there a need for another language there? 

-- Brian