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: 103376,86616b1931cbdae5 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Is Ada likely to survive ? Date: 1997/08/24 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 268347140 References: <97081409425535@psavax.pwfl.com> <5td7pt$fuj@saturn.brighton.ac.uk> Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-08-24T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: John says <> I can't follow this advice, why on earth waste hate, or for that matter love, on any programming language? In practice, nearly every language has some useful and interesting points to contribute to the world of language design ideas, and if your "hate" for a language means that you do not appreciate them, then you probably are missing something! (in the case of COBOL, I would say the most important ideas are scaled decimal arithmetic with specified portable precision, and completely portable arithmetic semantics. the hierarchical approach to data layout lightweight refinement, avoiding the need for heavily nested control structures. dynamic binding to subroutines at run time, allowing running systems to be modified dynamically integration of high level features like sorting and indexed IO This is not necessarily a complete list, just the start of one to give an idea. If you cannot make a similar list for language X, then it is probably because you do not know language X well enough! Remember, one of the weakest, and indeed most damaging, forms of advocacy for any language is making unfounded criticisms of other languages that you do not know well enough to criticize!