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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: C is 'better' than Ada because...
Date: 1996/07/01
Message-ID: <dewar.836270860@schonberg>#1/1
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references: <4q8fbo$701@red.interact.net.au>
 <31d5bbbb.161236846@netline-fddi.jpl.nasa.gov> <4r573p$1sf@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
 <31D7CFB5.15FB7483@mailgw.sanders.lockheed.com>
organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c
Date: 1996-07-01T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Mike said

"Ok, then here's a challenge.  Point me at any compress/decompress
package (a la Zip) written in Ada.  I've been searching the world and
come up empty.  Even here in the comp.lang.ada group I was referred to C
language implementations."

Maybe you should reread the earlier posts in this thread. The claim was
that you can program such utilities in Ada, not that someone has done so.
Indeed Ada is clearly expressive enough, as are many languages, for the
claim that you can program anything in Ada to be trivially true.

This does not mean that all possible tasks have already been programmed
in Ada, or that it is appropriate to do so. In fact as you may remember
from my earlier reaction to the discussion of compression algorithgms,
it seems idiotic to me to program such a utility in Ada when there are
perfectly usable reliable utilities already existing that you could use.