Re: Ada Advocacy.

["Luke A. Guest" <laguest@__n_o_s_p_a_m__abyss2.demon.co.uk>]

On Tue, 26 Aug 2003 20:33:29 +0000, Stephane Richard wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> In the goal to boost the Ada  programming language, along with the making of
> my website, I'm looking for either documents, or links to comparisons
> between ada and other languages, description of Ada features that set it
> apart from other languages, basically any kind of PR there is out there
> about Ada.

Not an URL, but something that I and other programmers have always wanted
to do in C/C++/etc. but cannot is the printing of names of variables ;-)

That's a damn nice debugging feature. It's been a while but I think it's
something like

declare
	test : Integer := 5;
begin
	-- I'm really unsure about the overloaded + operator here, like I said
	-- it's been a while (around 6 years!)
	Write test'Name + " = " + test;
end

should send "test = 5" to the console.

Something like that anyway ;-P Try doing that in C/C++ without a lookup
table :-(

Another thing that's really useful is being able to declare the range of,
say, an integer variable - and with bounds checking it gets caught at
compile & runtime (depending on whether it's accessed with a constant or
not).

The only downside to Ada is the amount of work that has to go into a
simple program just to dump out some text (not very good for beginners) to
the console.

Also meaningful names negates the need for the absolutely disgusting
hungarian notation.

I loved Ada at university and I'm really surprised that it's still not
really used as much as it should be.

Luke.