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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Papers saying Ada as an overly complex language and hard to
 implement
Date: 1998/02/15
Message-ID: <dewar.887600858@merv>#1/1
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1998-02-15T00:00:00+00:00
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<<Dear sir
     What papers introduce Ada as an overly complex language?
     And what papers explain why it's hard to write a compiler for?
     Thank you very much in advance.
Yongxiang
>>


Two comments here.

First, what does complex mean here?
Presumably it is in the sense of not-simple.

But simple can mean very different things

Simple to learn
Simple to use
Simple to describe informally
Simple to define formally
Simple to implement

These five aspects are not only different, but mutually incompatible. For
example, these days, it is generally perceived that languages need to
be fairly feature rich (Ada 95, C++, Fortran 90, OO COBOL, ...) to be
simple to use. Even Java is pretty feature rich, especially if you include
its standard libraries.

As for "hard to write a compiler for", Ada is no more difficult than
any of these other languages. These days the really hard part of any compiler
is doing a good job of optimizing the object code on modern 
architectures, and this is about the same effort for any language.

So I don't know if you can find the papers you are looking for, or what
you need them for, but papers that meet your criteria are likely to be
bogus.

(if they exist:-)