From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,208279d79d40e7d8 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-08-26 14:20:36 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!kibo.news.demon.net!news.demon.co.uk!demon!not-for-mail From: "Luke A. Guest" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada Advocacy. Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 22:20:36 +0100 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: abyss2.demon.co.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: news.demon.co.uk 1061932836 23890 62.49.62.197 (26 Aug 2003 21:20:36 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@demon.net NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 21:20:36 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: Pan/0.13.4 (She had eyes like strange sins.) Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:41870 Date: 2003-08-26T22:20:36+01:00 List-Id: 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.