Re: Improving Ada's image - Was: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics

["Alexander E. Kopilovich" <aek@VB1162.spb.edu>]

Warren W. Gay wrote:

> >>All the necessary tools exist. There's a free compiler, IDE, debugger, 
> >>GUI builder, etc., needed to go write apps in Ada.
> ...
> > Do you know a candidate that satisfies these conditions and still have no
> > reasonably good and solid implementation in, say, C/C++ ?
>
> Unless that was a typo, I would think that the point
> would be to compare _with_ an existing C/C++ implementation.

But I said "still have no reasonably good and solid implementation" - not just
any C/C++ implementation. I think that there is absolutely no reason to try
to compete with reasonably good and solid implementation; and after all you'll
definitely looe such a competition - because if your implementation even
appears better in some details/cases then C++ herd (remember that there are
many talented, skilled and experienced C++ programmers around) immediately
will produce new version of existing C++ implementation, in which they'll pay
enough attention to those not-so-good pieces of their code. And then they will
thank you for good benchmark/example -:) .

> Why compare where there is no competition?

Direct competition is just one and quite narrow and limited form of
comparison. In the case of powerful programming languages, such as Ada
and C++, a direct competition make little sense, if any.

Anyway, currently the aim to prove (for general programming community)
that Ada is better than C++ seems simply ridiculous. It will be great
if Ada proponents can point at one or two obviously good products written
in Ada - big and complex enough, open source, generally interesting (in
particular it should not be an Ada compiler or general-purpose Ada library,
like Charles), and there shouldn't be plenty of C++ analogs around, some
of them lighter while others more powerful (for example, Ada Web Server do not
qualify for that reason). So far I don't know any product of that kind.




Alexander Kopilovich                      aek@vib.usr.pu.ru
Saint-Petersburg
Russia