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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,dab7d920e4340f12 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 1014db,dab7d920e4340f12 X-Google-Attributes: gid1014db,public X-Google-Thread: 10d15b,d730ea9d54f7e063 X-Google-Attributes: gid10d15b,public From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: C is 'better' than Ada because... Date: 1996/08/02 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 171789905 references: <31e02c32.342948604@netline-fddi.jpl.nasa.gov> <4s4adc$l4a@ecuador.it.earthlink.net> <31EA0B65.3EF8@wgs.estec.esa.nl> <31EF7E48.5ABE@lmtas.lmco.com> <4ss8ru$3d4@felix.seas.gwu.edu> <31F28DBD.2A1D@harris.com> <31f3c52e.238719470 <4tnoeh$qjr@maverick.tad.eds.com> organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.cobol Date: 1996-08-02T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Darrin asks ""Why Ada? Who has ever proven it to be better than COBOL for typical business apps?" Well first of all the claim only makes sense for Ada 95, and of course no one has proven any such thing, since there has barely been enough time to do preliminary prototype implementations, let alone comparative evaluations. However, speaking as someone who knows COBOL and Ada 95 well (I am probably one of the only people who has done both a COBOL validation and an Ada 95 validation :-) I would say that it is a reasonable proposition. The information systems annex capabilities provide the key support that is missing in Ada 83 for scaled decimal arithmetic, and picture processing, and these are the only two areas in which COBOL is otherwise potentially superior (and was superior to Ada 83). Otherwise the standard features of Ada (stronger typing, better abstraction capabilities, runtime checking ...) seem to me clearly superior to what COBOL has to offer. I am quite a fan of COBOL, but it does show the problems of being built on a somewhat kludgy foundation.