Re: Ada and Java/C++

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

<kalvin.news@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:513d6efb-6aad-4013-8b21-37c75aa6aaf7@googlegroups.com...
>Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
>> Popularity of a language, programming or natural, has nothing to do with
>> its syntax.

>I have a contrary opinion on this. It is about perception and familiarity: 
>If something looks
> familiar to something that you already know, it appears more appealing 
> compared to something
> that you don't know. Lisp, Forth and APL are good examples of this. If 
> Java wouldn't be so
> similar to C/C++, it may have not become the mainstream language. Think 
> about situation in
> which Java would have used syntax similar to APL or Forth.

I agree with you here (but also see below). But the syntax of a language is 
a very important part of the foundation of the language. Ada's syntax is 
designed to minimize the possibility for inadvertant errors, which is not 
the case with the C syntax. (See, for instance, the discussion in Rationale 
2012 about this: 
http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/12rat/html/Rat12-3-2.html.)

You can build huge ediface on top of any sort of foundation, but if the 
foundation is rotten (as I believe it is in the case of the C syntax), you 
are going to have problems. Personally, I think a substantial part of the 
benefit of using Ada is from the much safer syntax. (I'm well aware that 
this does not match conventional wisdom; so you'll have to draw your own 
conclusions.)

>Think about learning a new language: It is easier to learn a new language 
>that has resemblance
> to the language you already know and speak.

Here I strongly disagree. The above might be true for natural languages, but 
for programming languages, you want the syntax of the various ones you use 
to be as different as possible. Speaking from my own experience, when 
Janus/Ada was originally constructed in Pascal, the subtle differences 
between the two languages (both in syntax and semantics) used to drive us 
nutty. We switched our development to Ada as soon as Janus/Ada was 
sufficiently capable.

I would expect similar experiences for people who have to regularly work in 
both C and Java, and I know I've seem people make comments to that effect.

To summarize: it might help for causal users to use a syntax closer to that 
of C (mainly because there are a lot of people that think that a programming 
language has to look like C), but such a syntax would reduce the value of 
Ada a lot. I suspect that it mostly would be used to write C-in-Ada, which 
would have no added benefit at all. (And that would probably have the 
opposite effect to that you suggest.)

In any case, nothing prevents one from creating a preprocessor that converts 
a C-like syntax to Ada. If you think it is such a good idea, go create it 
and prove it to the skeptics. If it gets a lot of use, compilers will adopt 
it (and if not, no harm done).

                                                 Randy.