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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: a07f3367d7,d5b211b0c1ffcf3e X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Received: by 10.204.149.210 with SMTP id u18mr345334bkv.1.1339687141048; Thu, 14 Jun 2012 08:19:01 -0700 (PDT) Path: e27ni47667bkw.0!nntp.google.com!news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Adam Beneschan Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Practicalities of Ada for app development Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2012 14:55:22 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: <1636da0f308fb314caa1f987443dfa51@dizum.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 66.126.103.122 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Trace: posting.google.com 1339451824 3233 127.0.0.1 (11 Jun 2012 21:57:04 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2012 21:57:04 +0000 (UTC) In-Reply-To: <1636da0f308fb314caa1f987443dfa51@dizum.com> Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com; posting-host=66.126.103.122; posting-account=duW0ogkAAABjRdnxgLGXDfna0Gc6XqmQ User-Agent: G2/1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Date: 2012-06-11T14:55:22-07:00 List-Id: On Monday, June 11, 2012 2:10:07 PM UTC-7, Nomen Nescio wrote: > Jeffrey Carter wrote: >=20 > > On 06/10/2012 05:00 PM, Nasser M. Abbasi wrote: > > > > > > But perl is here now and it is what is used for string > > > processing more than anything I would think. > >=20 > > C is here now and it is what is used for networking S/W more than anyth= ing. > >=20 > > COBOL is here now and it is what is used for financial S/W more than an= ything. > >=20 > > Popularity is hardly a reason to choose a language. > >=20 >=20 > I worked on an Ada project where Ada SWEs with ~5-15 years experience > were tasked with a text manipulation problem. Took these senior > engineers *days* to complete the project. One of them deviated from > the crowd and used PERL. Took him less than 2 hours to complete the > coursework. After that, the company banned PERL for that particular > project (fyi, it was a six sigma project). >=20 > There is a good reason Ada is "unpopular" for text parsing and > manipulation. The length of time it takes to write a program isn't a valid metric. Real = software not only has to be written, it has to be read and maintained later= , often by someone who is not the person who originally wrote it. If someo= ne thinks a language is better just because it lets you write programs fast= er, I'm not sure that person should be called a software engineer. Given that, there are some things are built into Perl but not Ada that are = useful for handling text, such as RE matching. But there are existing libr= aries to do such things in Ada. I think Vadim Godunko has a regular expres= sion matcher (although I really haven't looked at it), and for those who di= slike regular expressions there are alternatives. I haven't actually tried= any of them, so I can't speak to how simple they are to use, but maybe oth= ers have and can comment. I'm sure that even with those libraries, it woul= d still take a little longer to write programs in Ada, because Ada is a lit= tle more verbose. But that's what helps programs be more readable, not to = mention less error-prone. -- Adam