Re: Build language with weak typing, then add scaffolding later to strengthen it?

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

<jan.de.kruyf@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:ac78c8c6-de94-4f92-afcb-c1ae78523245@googlegroups.com...
...
> And statistics prove that point. I have written 1000th's of lines in 
> Oberon and
> 1000th's of lines in Ada. Both highly technical software.
>And I got exactly the same kind of errors on compiling and running: errors 
>caused
> by my sloppy habits. And both the Oberon compiler that fits on a floppy (a 
> floppy,
> not a stiffy) and Gcc which stands at over 1Gig of source in the latest
> implementation, caught them equally well and also the runtime errors that 
> I caused
> were exactly the same.

Uh-huh. Janus/Ada 83 fit on and ran on floppies. (Heck, there wasn't 
anything else available on early MS-DOS.) Even the relatively tiny 5 1/4" 
floppies. It still would if you could find a machine that has floppies. The 
bloat is in GCC, not necessarily in Ada.

The bloat in the Standard (such as it is) came from adding lots of stuff 
that people thought was necessary (but argubly isn't): tagged types and 
dispatching, interfaces, prefix calls, assertions, and (especially) 
containers.

>So please explain to me why on earth I or DoD or ISO or anybody else needs 
>all the bloat to confuse us.

We don't. As with all old languages, it's political. We can't remove old 
features (as that would break existing programs), so the only possibility is 
for the Standard to get bigger. It's also getting bigger because we've (me 
in particular) have been insisting on adding wording to fill holes, rather 
than just ignoring them. Based on my experience, I think a language standard 
with 17 pages is about 90% hole (unless, of course, the language doesn't 
actually do anything).

I'd think it's getting close to time to start over with Ada, not because of 
any major problem, but simply the accumulation of cruft. The problem is that 
if you think its hard to convince people to use Ada with all of its track 
record, try doing that with a new language with no record. So I don't think 
there would be much of a market for that.

                        Randy.