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-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,103b407e8b68350b X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-01-05 20:39:39 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: kcline17@hotmail.com (Kevin Cline) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Anybody in US using ADA ? One silly idea.. Date: 5 Jan 2003 20:39:38 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Message-ID: References: <3E147D79.2070703@cogeco.ca> <4519e058.0301031434.51a0c880@posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.219.89.90 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1041827979 31688 127.0.0.1 (6 Jan 2003 04:39:39 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 6 Jan 2003 04:39:39 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:32600 Date: 2003-01-06T04:39:39+00:00 List-Id: Ted Dennison wrote in message news:... > Kevin Cline wrote: > > With no access to subprogram types, attaching Ada-83 subprograms to > > widget callbacks was a real puzzle for me. At the time I was doing > > Damn near every compiler realised that fairly early on, and provided a > (non-standard) way to do that, documented in Appendex F (if I remember > correctly). However, 1988 is before my time, so I don't know if it > counts as "fairly early on". > > > > near the quality of the free GNU C compiler. Within a week of > > starting > > to program in Ada I found legal code that one or the other compiler > > rejected. > > That's hardly anything you wouldn't have to deal with using C though. I > believe there *was* a C standard in 88, but you wouldn't have known it > to look at the compilers available. The same goes today for C++. The > most commonly used C++ compiler today (MSVC++ 6.0) is just barely over > 60% compliant, which means its barely more of a C++ compiler than not. I > can tell you from sad experience that trying anything more than the most > basic of the STL examples in Stroustrup's book will fail miserably with it. > > > > work. But most > > of the problems with C were solved by the introduction of C++. > > Having worked with both, I'd say that is just true. However, 60% less of > C's language-induced problems is not near enough. Plus, C++ adds several > new ones of its own, and even makes some of C's existing problems far > worse. (eg: Now unexpected implicit type casts can happen with *any* > type, not just the numeric ones) > > > Today, the features that Ada provides have little value > > compared with the features that C++ provides and Ada lacks: > > the STL, automatic template function instantiation, smooth > > I'd agree a bit with that. However, MSVC++ 6 doesn't really have this > feature either. A large amount of the compilers that do have it, do it > differently from each other. That effectively means you can't count on > it in portable code. That's why rule #1 in the Mozilla C++ portability > guide is "Don't use C++ templates". (see > http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/portable-cpp.htmll#dont_use_templates) That document is now almost five years old. Two years before that I was working on template code that compiled on HP/UX, IBM AIX, Solaris, and MSVC 5.0. Today most template code is portable, except for a couple of features not implemented by MSVC 6.0. I think that Microsoft Ada supports an even smaller subset of the Ada language. > > integration of user-defined and primitive datatypes, and > > bindings to every API in existence. > > I don't really consider this an issue. Bindings to anything that has a C > interface are almost trivial to generate. Do you mean they can be generated automatically?