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=0.2 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,dab7d920e4340f12 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: rogoff@sccm.Stanford.EDU (Brian Rogoff) Subject: Re: Ada is 'better' than C because... Date: 1996/07/30 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 171113755 references: <01bb7bf9$b89a1740$96ee6fcf@timhome2> <4tj43k$16r@newsbf02.news.aol.com> organization: /u/rogoff/.organization reply-to: rogoff@sccm.stanford.edu newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-07-30T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: johnherro@aol.com (John Herro) writes: "Tim Behrendsen" writes: > If C is so bad (in many people's opinion, > not mine), why is it used almost universally? Inertia! Because it's effort to change! But how did it become so popular that it could have inertia working on its side? Pascal appeared at roughly the same time, FORTH and PL/1 precede it. Why don't all the schools teach Esperanto as a second language, so that anyone in the world could communicate with anyone? Inertia! The difficulty of finding teachers for a relatively little-known language! Besides, broken English is the de-facto Esperanto ;-). Ada really *IS* an improvement over C. C's biggest fault is that is doesn't have procedures, only functions. To modify calling parameters, C has to use difficult-to-read and error-prone pointers, in a situation where pointers shouldn't be necessary at all. I agree that Ada is better than C, however, I have always been puzzled by the distinction in Ada between functions and procedures, which I view as an unnecessary relic of Pascal. Why not just allow procedures which return things? Your complaint about C is more about its lack of parameter modes. -- Brian