Re: Logic Errors and Ada (Was: A big hairy thread on Ada, Quality, and Drivers)

[Tom Welsh <news@tom-welsh.co.uk>]

In article <9fa75d42.0305200821.46ac73bf@posting.google.com>, soft-eng
<softeng3456@netscape.net> writes
>
>This from supporters of a 20-year language on life-support?
>(In human years I guess that's like a 250 years old or
>something, fighting with the remaining tooth and nail
>for the good-old-days.)

Are you implying that older languages are necessarily worse? That is not
always true by any means...

"Algol 60 was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on
nearly all its successors" - C. A. R. Hoare

Don't forget that C is nearly twice as old as Ada (Ada-83, that is, the
older version). And Bjarne Stroustrup invented "C with classes",
which later became known as C++, in 1979 - four years before the first
Ada compilers appeared.

If a 20-year-old language is like a 250-year-old person, I guess C must
be more like a 400-year-old. As for that Methuselah of languages, COBOL,
which dates back to 1959-61, that would correspond to over 500 years.
Which is probably why there are some 200 billion lines of COBOL code in
active service, accounting for 70-85 percent of the world's business
systems. (And before you say it's all old, another 5 billion lines of
COBOL is written every year according to Gartner).

New is not always better. 
-- 
Tom Welsh