Re: point by point advantages of Ada

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

John R. Strohm wrote:
> Why is it that we never hear complaints about C++ being a language "designed
> by a committee", given the HUGE expansion of the language during the ISO
> "standardization" process?

Probably because the people given to such carping don't know enough
about C++ to realize that this is the case!

> If the ISO standardization had been just that, standardizing current usage,
> all of the existing compilers should have become standard-compliant almost
> immediately.  Instead, the ISO committee undertook a HUGE expansion of the
> language, and, as a direct result, it has taken YEARS for the FIRST compiler
> to become compliant, and Comeau isn't exactly one of the mainstream vendors.

True enough. On the other hand, we C++ programmers have been plugging along
quite usefully in the mean time. It's actually taken almost as long for
people to begin writing code that hits the difficult parts of the language.
To a certain extent, the compiler writers have been waiting for code that
would teach them the language. Anyway, Microsoft is feverishly working on
getting their compiler Standard-compliant. And I beliver the expanded form
of the language is vastly superior in most cases to the then current usage,
so I'm glad the committee did what it did.