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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Practicalities of Ada for app development
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:01:31 -0500
Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation
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Date: 2012-06-21T13:01:31-05:00
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"Nomen Nescio" <nobody@dizum.com> wrote in message 
news:145eefe89c8eae1ef97489ba21b94d63@dizum.com...
...
> Metric's for expressive power are useful for comparing the languages
> fitness for a particular purpose.  E.g. if the purpose is filtering
> e-mail, it would be foolish to neglect to consider the language that
> probably has the single most expressive power for that kind of job
> (the procmail language).  The language was in fact specially designed
> just for that purpose.

I don't know about that -- learning another language adds a significant time 
investment, so special purpose languages have to be amazingly good to have 
any value. (Which they don't, IMHO.)

I wrote my spam filter in Ada (and on my own time, it never was intended to 
be a product), and the text processing was not that much of a problem. 
Indeed, the only real issue was that I refuse to use "use clauses", and thus 
a lot of the expressions became unreadable because of 
"Ada.Strings.Unbounded." everywhere. The less stuborn would not have that 
problem.

I think I spend a lot of time on the GUI, and on the SMTP implementation, 
but not that much on the string manipulation. Which I suspect mainly 
demonstrates that people tend to be the most productive using the tools that 
they are the most familar (and comfortable) with.

                                                   Randy.