Re: Ada Versus PL/I - The debate continues

["John W. Kennedy" <jwkenne@attglobal.net>]

Richard Riehle wrote:
> And your observations indicate that you have very little
> knowledge of the current version of Ada.   As to built-in
> functions,  Ada has a powerful collection of these. However,
> some of the functions built-in to PL/I are, as part of the Ada language
> standard, implemented in standard libraries.  There is no
> performance penalty and there is a significant portability
> benefit.

Unfortunately, Robin seems to think that, while PL/I BUILTIN functions 
are somehow "part of the language", and therefore susceptible to all 
known forms of inlining and optimization, the Ada library is "only 
library routines" and therefore subject to all the overhead of 
pre-compiled, linked, external subroutines.

> Ada's support for decimal arithmetic is as good as, and perhaps
> a little better than PL/I.    This is an important addition to the
> current version of Ada which was, admittedly, a drawback in
> the first version of Ada.  That drawback has been corrected and
> in correcting it, the designers learned a lot about what not to do
> from other languages (maybe even PL/I).

Even before Ada 95, Ada had learned the crucial lesson from PL/I that 
there is no such thing as a good universal default precision for the 
result of fixed-point multiplication and division.  (PL/I was still an 
improvement on COBOL, which ignored the question altogether.)

> Error recovery in Ada works quite well, thank you.

Robin believes that it is a _good_ thing that PL/I allows the run-time 
ON statement to alter the currently-assigned error recovery, and that 
PL/I allows return to point of error, and will not be convinced that 
both of these were excluded from Ada (and every other language I know of 
with error handling) precisely because experience with PL/I was unfortunate.

-- 
John W. Kennedy
"Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts.  Only
the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots
would fight a war on twelve fronts"
   -- "Babylon 5"