Re: ada paper critic

[Immanuel Scholz <news@kutzsche.net>]

Ehud Lamm wrote:
>> > Finally, this is clearly a troll. Let us all show the superiority of
>> > those who use Ada by never responding to trolls.
> 
> Right!

Wrong. Sometimes only provocative statements can change you from a local 
maximum of tapping yourself on the shoulder, if you get my mind.



> No. Most of them are simply incorrect. So he is not really helping you
> (the OP).
> 
> Ada is not perfect, but understanding the weak points in a language is not
> easy. You have to undersand the language itself quite well.
> You may check Ada-Issues and the ARG mailing list, for some problems
> people are trying to fix with the language.
> You may also use the language for awhile.
> I agree that a nice discussion of problems with the language can be an
> interesting read. Perhaps you can learn something from the issues raised
> about Ada83 when Ada95 was designed.

Maybe I was searching not for a too philosophic answer. I am actually 
interested more in a somewhat dirty reply - the paper I have to write is 
not as academic as it should be.

But you are right. I should learn (and I am willing to) more about Ada. It 
seems quite fascinating to me, especially because it is significant harder 
to write really nasty code in ada.


> I can't get into many details here, and each issue itself is
> controversial. But I agree that sometimes automatic template instantiation
> can be nice. I also think template specialization can be quite useful.
> I would like larger (STL like) standard library (well, you all know that
> by now...).

Maybe... but it is a powerful weapon that can be used against you. I prefer 
languages without too powerful weapons (my definition for too powerful ends 
somewhere about "operator-overloading" ;-).
(The extense use of pointer arithmetic is the wordst and most powerful 
weapon in C).


> There are many other issues, I think the question itself is to broad. If
> you want to gain insight choose some area a bit more specific to think/ask
> about (e.g., generics, OOP, or whatever).

What about the operator overloading possibilities in ada?


One disadvantage I recovered up to now is the lack of a GUI-Library to 
develop on the graphical sector. Are there any library out (beside GTK's)? 



Immanuel Scholz