Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

Robert C. Leif wrote:
> To be fair, Ada should be compared to Wirth's latest creation, Oberon.
> Oberon is available as a .NET compiler. While the Ada community has talked
> incessantly about writing an operating system, Wirth and Gutknecht did.
> Oberon and its operating system are described in Project Oberon,
> Addison-Wesley ACM Press ISBN 0-201-54428-8. http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/.
> Some of the Oberon software could be translated into Ada.


I have the book, and have even used the OS. I don't think its something 
that someone used to a modern OS is going to enjoy. But its nice to see 
people experimenting with the basic UI assumptions we are all accustomed 
to (well..it *was* nice to see back in '95 anyway).

Oberon itself is interesting, but I wouldn't want to write something 
large in it (assuming Ada was available). Wirth's primary obsession when 
writing it was in keeping the language simple. That's a worthy goal, but 
the primary one should be keeping the user's programs simple (and easy 
to understand and easy to debug, etc.). I'd say the two are closely 
related, but are not the same thing.