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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 5b1e799cdb,3ef3e78eacf6f938 X-Google-Attributes: gid5b1e799cdb,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!o6g2000yqj.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: tm Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.modula3,comp.lang.pascal.misc,comp.programming Subject: Re: Alternatives to C: ObjectPascal, Eiffel, Ada or Modula-3? Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 07:37:35 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 195.58.191.10 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1248100656 24561 127.0.0.1 (20 Jul 2009 14:37:36 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:37:36 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: o6g2000yqj.googlegroups.com; posting-host=195.58.191.10; posting-account=269_QwoAAADSifhJt6OVa6bEjZR2ZMUB User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.5,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.eiffel:329 comp.lang.ada:7176 comp.lang.modula3:55 comp.lang.pascal.misc:302 comp.programming:11891 Date: 2009-07-20T07:37:35-07:00 List-Id: On 20 Jul., 11:57, Jean-Pierre Rosen wrote: > Andrea Taverna a =E9crit : > [...]> =A0 =A0 - Ada is best suited for large teams and/or critical softw= are, thus > > it may be overkill for my work, OTH it could have anything I might > > happen to need. > > What holds me from jumping onto Ada is the potential complexity > > As a long time teacher of Ada, let me elaborate on this particular issue. > > 1) More than complex, Ada is feature-rich, with some properties that do > not exist in most other languages (user defined elementary types, > discriminants, stack-allocated dynamic structures ...). Of course, > you'll have to learn about these features - if you want to use them. > > 2) Ada is extremely consistent. You'll have to learn the basic > principles, but once you've got them, you'll discover that all the > features follow the same logic. Therefore, the first step might be > higher than for other languages, but then everything appears logical and > easy to grasp. > > 3) Ada is simple to use, because difficulty of implementation has never > been an excuse for forbidding something that the user would expect to > work. However, that makes the language complex to compile, and part of > the alledged complexity of Ada refers to complexity of implementation, That is exactly the area where Ada left the path of Pascal. Pascal was designed to be easy to implement. Nicklaus Wirth had good reasons to keep the implementation simple. He once said (IIRC): What can be parsed easily by a compiler can also be parsed easily by a human and this can be an asset. He probably did not use exactly this words, but they hopefully describe his intentions. Many languages try to make the job of writing a program easier and at the same time make the job of reading programs is harder. All this wonderful "do what I mean" concepts used by many languages fail in some cases. IMHO complex compilation processes are an indication of hard-to-understand concepts or hard-to-read constructs. As such a complex compilation process only seemingly (and not really) makes programming easier. Greetings Thomas Mertes Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net Seed7 - The extensible programming language: User defined statements and operators, abstract data types, templates without special syntax, OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch, statically typed, interpreted or compiled, portable, runs under linux/unix/windows.