RE: the Ada mandate, and why it collapsed and died (was): 64 bitaddressing and OOP

["Beard, Frank Randolph CIV" <frank.beard@navy.mil>]

-----Original Message-----
From: soft-eng [mailto:softeng3456@netscape.net]

> That's exactly the problem -- because there were so
> many itsy-bitsy features in Ada, a novice needed to
> learn all of them, because somebody somewhere finds
> it useful and it will be found in real-world code.

Nothing says you have to learn every feature of Ada to
use it.  I think you will inevitably miss out on 
something if you don't, but that's a different point.
I'm sure you could write many programs with just 
integers and strings if you wanted to, but odds are
you could find a much more elegant and efficient way
by knowing more features of the language.

> Having tons of features in auxiliary libraries
> in the "C" style make mastering the language much simpler
> by chunking the task of learning without complicating
> the syntax issues.

I disagree.  I see very little difference here.  All you've
done is defer the problem.  If we are talking about a
maintenance issue here, at least if it's defined in the
language, I can go look it up in the reference manual if
I come across something in code I have to maintain.  I'd
rather be able to look it up in a reference manual than
try to figure out how to use something I may not have the 
documentation to.

You also have the problem of libraries that don't exist
on certain platforms.

> But having them directly in the language itself makes
> just learning the basic language unnecessarily harder.
> And the trouble is, you don't get anything really
> worthwhile out of all the time you spend on
> mastering all that syntax.  You would have
> been better off mastering concepts instead.

You are saying it's better to "master" a core that
doesn't do much, and then pick out libraries (if you
know about them) that help you do more.

What's the difference in that and picking out a 
subset of the language to "master", and then picking
out more features that help you do more.  I'd rather
have that in a language that is standardized with
features that are guaranteed to be there.

Just my 0.02.

Frank