Re: Do really Ada give you a camel when you expected a horse?

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Le Sun, 07 Oct 2012 04:44:57 +0200, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)  
<yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> a écrit:
> Note: I am not posting this as an easy criticism about Lua in an Ada  
> place ; and there's no bad intentions from them with this sentence,  
> which starts in such way it's clear it should not be taken literally (if  
> all criticisms could be as funny as this one…).

Moreover, this paper is not that bad, and contains a clever remark:

     Everyone that works with programming languages knows how easy
     it is for people to start "religious wars" about the subject.
     An interesting characteristic of those wars is that, usually,
     the more mundane the subject, the hotter the discussion. For
     instance, people get much more excited discussing semicolons
     than discussing higher-order functions.

I agree with this.

However, I don't agree with their later arguments (later after the first  
quote) about “committee languages” and the issues they feel to see with  
designing prior to implementing. As an example, if “not null” was part of  
Ada since the beginning, there would be a cleaner syntax for it, a “not  
null” by default, which would be more close to the model authors surely  
have in mind ; a more complex example would be with interface types and  
tagged types. Things get cleaner when designed the sooner, and before  
implemented.

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University