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From: Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
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Subject: Re: Improving Ada's image - Was: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics
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Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 22:01:51 GMT
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Warren W. Gay VE3WWG wrote:
> Its not a function of memory. Its a function of programmers
> taking the path of least resistance. In fact you hear this
> from C programmers all the time when they try to learn
> Ada ("I just want to do ...", or "it won't let me do...",
> "why can't I..."). Ada enforces more rigour in the
> code's design.

I'll bet you good money that I can tell you exactly what in
the code those frustrated C programmers are talking about;
string handling.

And that's because Ada comes with a type named String which
behaves nothing at all like strings in C or C++, being just
a name for an array of characters, which may be declared with
runtime bounds or returned from a function but is then fixed
in size.

The concept is foreign to C programmers, for whom arrays in
expressions decay to pointers, and which cannot be passed or
returned by value. And I'll bet that *no one explains this*
when teaching Ada. The semantic gap becomes so large that it's
no wonder that C programmers wind up frustrated when trying to
do simple things that work properly in their old language.