Re: Any research putting c above ada?

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shellx.best.com>]

On 18 May 1997, Jon S Anthony wrote:
> In article <12871CEBFAB00ABE.93483F73373D0261.D1086334F6EF8ED8@library-proxy.airnews.net> clines@delete_this.airmail.net (Kevin Cline) writes:
> > inflexible applications.  OTOH, I have observed that the
> > availability of the C++ STL containers is already expanding the
> > toolkit of average C++ developers.
> 
> Well, despite the unsupported claims of AS, STL could be implemented
> in Ada95 without much problem.  In fact, the RPI people have a
> reasonable first effort (though it adheres too much to the underlying
> _implementation_ aspects of AS's C++ definition).

	I don't think AS claimed that an STL like library couldn't be
implemented in Ada 95, just that Ada 83 was not up to the task. In fact, 
I remember him writing that Ada 95 is much better for this.

	I agree with you about the current RPI implementation. I've been 
rewriting a that library, and one of the few things I found really weird 
was that the Random_Access_Iterators generic signature package uses
Ptrdiff_T directly. Still, it succeeds as a proof of concept, though it is 
missing quite a bit.

> OTOH, there is really nothing in the STL that is all that interesting
> IMO.  Yes, some think it is pretty cool achievement to have split the
> container types and iterators so orthogonally.  That's kinda nice, but
> has nothing to do with C++.  As for the rest of it: it's just the same
> old stuff that's been done over and over again for the last 25+ years.

	The power of something like the STL is mostly that it is widely
used, and hopefully not awful for many tasks. By having an Ada "work
alike" for this library, people who use C++ as well as Ada have a
little less of a learning curve to climb. Note that the JGL, Java Generic 
Library (yeah right!) is purposely crafted to be similar to the STL 
too.

	FWIW, I think the STL (AGL really) works fine in Ada 95, the only 
burden for C++ programmers might be those long instantiations (C++ does 
implicit instantiation) and C++ template partial specialization. 

-- Brian