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From: "Chad R. Meiners" <crmeiners@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.advocacy,comp.object,comp.lang.ada,misc.misc
Subject: Re: the Ada mandate,
 and why it collapsed and died (was): 64 bit  addressing and OOP
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2003 14:48:57 -0400
Organization: Michigan State University
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"soft-eng" <softeng3456@netscape.net> wrote in message
news:9fa75d42.0304250937.36a7897e@posting.google.com...
>
> I think you need some actual experience with programmers
> of different language.

I have such experience; do you?

> Then you will be able to
> make valid arguments on this.  E.g. how much of
> the syntax of Java or VB the typical programmer
> knows.

I have work on projects in both VB and Java.  In both cases competent
programmers only knew subsets of the language's syntax.  This subsetting did
not hamper the projects' success.

> but most of the syntax
> is well understood by most programmers.

Ha!  Just the other day I ran into a competent programmer that never
realized that the {} defines a block in C that you can declare variables in.
Sure he used {}'s all the time, but he didn't understand their flexibility
until told him.  Still he produced acceptable work when he had to work in C.
How many competent Java programmers don't know about the synchronize keyword
because they never have writen a multithreaded application?

Also are you talking just about syntax or about both syntax and semantics?
If you are only concerned with syntax then we have an uninteresting
discussion, however, if you are interested in semantics, then almost all
programmers only know of subset of each programming language's syntax.