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: 103376,9e2776c05028676e X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Why Ada is not the Commercial Lang of Choice Date: 1997/06/20 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 251445697 References: <33A7FBFF.29D2@mitre.org> Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-06-20T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Robert Eachus said <<"right" but why take the risk. Also, it might be necessary to call System.Storage_Elements.To_Address, but I can't imagine any compiler for a machine where 16#B01000040# is a meaningful address not allowing literals for addresses.>> While I agree with your nice post (gee, you can shorten the number of characters still further by using "for use at" instead of "for address use" :-) I must disagree with this statement. The RM recommends that Address be a private type, many compilers, including the RM, follow this advice, and hence the use of To_Address would be required. And, gasp! that would mean the Ada code has more characters than the C code!!! What is amazing is that anyone could think that brevity is an absolute indicator of usability of a programming language. Attitudes constantly amaze! One of the criticisms of COBOL is that it is wordy. When I gave a talk at Berkeley on COBOL (it was called something like "All the things you should know about COBOL and probably don't"), I spent the first few minutes debunking this absurd notion (programs in COBOL after often shorter than corresponding code in C or Pascal), and the next few minutes complaining that this is in any case a totally irrelevant metric.