WAS Re: Pre-Elaboration clarification.

["Mark Lundquist" <up.yerz@nospam.com>]

Sorry, this isn't about elaboration or anything, but I couldn't think of a
good, non-inflammatory, i.e. non-C++-bashing :-) subject line for this...

"Matthew Heaney" <mheaney@on2.com> wrote in message
news:u0a91lan036634@corp.supernews.com...
> You can read John Lakos' Large
> Scale C++ Software Design for ideas that apply to either C++ or Ada95.

I recommend this book to anyone considering Ada, to read as part of a
comparative language study.  For one, it's a good book.  This is really how
you have to live in C++.  But the reasons why are oh-so-illustrative.

One of the dings you hear against Ada is that it's full of all these
confining *rules*, which supposedly stifle one's creativity, and result in
unacceptable syntactic overhead (i.e. verbiage) in the 0.1% of cases when
one needs to do something unsafe.

But it turns out that survival with C++ depends on a system of conventions,
which are outside the language and must be developed and written about by
gurus in books, and which have to be enforced, not by a compiler but by a
human being (this being both error prone and a human resource drain).  I.e.,
the conventions become draconian rules!

Since we have to have rules, I'd a lot rather have them be language rules
enforced by a compiler than ad hoc provincial rules enforced by a
"conventions czar".

-- mark