Re: Ada & MacOS

["Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam@spam.com>]

Maciej Sobczak wrote:

>> With Ada, the entire standard language is compiled by every compiler; 
>> a compiler that didn't implement, say, generics, would be laughed out 
>> of existence. Yet "C++" users regularly use compilers that don't 
>> implement templates, exceptions, or namespaces.
> 
> Really? Taking into account what I've seen during the last few years on 
> comp.lang.c++.moderated, I'd say that today such compilers are 
> extraordinarily rare, something like a living mammoth. I don't call it 
> "regularly use".
 >
> I'm writing this from Mozilla, written in C++, running happily on most 
> desktop platforms you can find today. Have Mozilla been written in Ada, 
> it wouldn't be much more portable.

Interesting that you mention Mozilla. Take a look at their rules for writing C++ 
for the project:

http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/portable-cpp.html

Lots of things you can't use, including no templates (a few exceptions), no 
exceptions, no namespaces. That's for contributing to Mozilla today, because so 
many of the compilers used to build Mozilla for various platforms today don't 
support these basic features of the language.

> BTW - why do you write "C++" in question marks, and Ada without them?

C++ is an ISO standard; anything that isn't the language defined in that 
standard isn't C++. Lots of people use the name "C++" to refer to things that 
aren't C++; I use "C++" to refer to such things.

By the way, '"' is a quotation mark; '?' is a question mark.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"You tiny-brained wipers of other people's bottoms!"
Monty Python & the Holy Grail
18