Re: Alternatives to C: ObjectPascal, Eiffel, Ada or Modula-3?

[Jean-Pierre Rosen <rosen@adalog.fr>]

Andrea Taverna a écrit :
[...]
>     - Ada is best suited for large teams and/or critical software, 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,
not complexity of use. Of course, as a user, you don't care about this,
since you have compilers, even free ones, that implement the language
correctly, and this is checked by passing the validation suite (AKA ACATS).
-- 
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           J-P. Rosen (rosen@adalog.fr)
Visit Adalog's web site at http://www.adalog.fr