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,ca0b11ae1c9a00cb X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Papers saying Ada as an overly complex language and hard to implement Date: 1998/02/16 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 325691966 References: <34E7B551.115C289F@cs.utexas.edu> <34E8AA02.7ED447E0@cs.utexas.edu> X-Complaints-To: usenet@news.nyu.edu X-Trace: news.nyu.edu 887671108 15765 (None) 128.122.140.58 Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-02-16T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Yongxiang Gao says <> Speaking from the point of view of having taught Ada to beginners, I regard this unsubstantiated claim as nonsense. You do not teach beginners all the features in a language on day one, and I have found that the fact that Ada is feature rich has no significant impact on the process of teaching Ada to beginners. <> To which one might reply, do you know who I am??? :-) Yes, I am very aware of the Ada implementations in the early 80's. First, I lead the team that did the first validated implementation, and second, I worked extensively for Alsys, one of the companies doing these implementations. Yes, it is true that writing an Ada compiler is not an easy task, but neither is writing a compiler for any of the other modern large languages. PL/1 was hurt badly early on by the difficulty of writing good compilers. C++ compilers have taken a long time to begin to get reasonably reliable, and almost none are fully ISO-compliant yet. The difficulty of implementing Fortran-90 is great enough that it is still nowhere near universal, despite the date. OO COBOL is *quite* hard to implement (I was involved deeply in a COBOL implementation, and in some of the discussions leading up to OO COBOL). Algol-68 was badly hurt by the amount of effort required for good implementations. And yet we see isolated examples in each case where good compilers have appeared on a reasonable time scale (DEC Ada reached a good level of maturity early on, as has, for that matter GNAT, which is only six years old at this stage). The CDC implementation of Algol-68 was complete and excellent. The GE implementation of PL/1 on Multics was highly effective, and the IBM F90 is coming along nicely. Remember the issue here is whether Ada is *more* difficult than other languages. There is no technical reason to think the answer is yes, and there is no experience which would indicate that the answer is yes. All we have is your unsubstantiated belief that this is the case, and the assumption that therefore there must be papers supporting this belief. I know of no such papers. As for being constructive, I am trying to be constructive, but you are asking for papers verifying assumptions that you are making that are simply not valid!