Re: bitwise comparators

["Mike Silva" <mjsilva@jps.net>]

Alexander Van Hecke wrote in message <38834F16.FE5DE77F@hotmail.com>...
>>
>> here's an off-the-cuff list of Ada features I find "more powerful" than C
>> (my primary language):
>>
>> Strong typing
>> Multitasking
>> Generics
>> Tagged Types
>> Packages
>> Exceptions
>> Discriminants
>> Arrays indexed over arbitrary ranges, including enumerations
>> Much greater control over variable range and representation
>> Runtime error checking
>
>I'm not sure why you think these features are more _powerful_ than in C.
I'd
>label these features as more _advanced_.  C is an old language (allthough
I'm
>not sure at all about Ada), but nearly all those things you sum up are
>_possible_ in C, maybe they're not as easy as in Ada and require the
programmer
>to explicitly program them (which may take a lot of code), but they're
>possible.

I interpreted "powerful" to mean faster and/or easier.  It's true that
anything you can do in Ada you can do in C, given enough manually-coded
conditional statements (each of which, of course, is capable of being
miscoded).  Much of Ada's "power" comes from the availability of constructs
that more closely or naturally map to the problem universe, while more of
Ada's power comes from all the extra grunt work the compiler (and runtime)
do to ensure the integrity of the problem universe; code which would have to
be written manually to do the same job (but not as well) in C, assuming it
got written at all.
>
>Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to make Ada look bad here, but I think
my
>previous statement stands : suppose you have no previous programming
experience
>whatsoever, I think that C is a lot easier to learn than Ada is...

Sometimes I wonder what language I'll teach my kids when they get old
enough.  It may very well be Ada, but it won't be C -- too low-level and
unstructured.  It's quite feasible to learn and use subsets of Ada and add
on as desired.

If you want Ada to be C you'll always be fighting it -- you need to make a
concious decision to "write Ada" in Ada.

Mike