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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 10261c,cfbb90c56a313e70 X-Google-Attributes: gid10261c,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,cfbb90c56a313e70 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: marcov@toad.stack.nl (Marco van de Voort) Subject: Re: From extended Pascals to Ada 95 guide Date: 2000/08/28 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 663381230 References: <8o3s2a$9ph$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <8o4bfq$v0h$1@slb7.atl.mindspring.net> <8obv01$7hu1@news.cis.okstate.edu> <39A991F3.A8D8BED7@easystreet.com> Organization: Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands User-Agent: slrn/0.9.6.2 (FreeBSD) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.pascal.misc Date: 2000-08-28T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <39A991F3.A8D8BED7@easystreet.com>, Al Christians wrote: >David Starner wrote: >> >> Okay, why isn't Ada a "Wirth-style language", if Modula-3 is? They >> share more in common with each other than either does with Wirth's >> Pascal, for instance. >> > >The principal criterium is size of the language definition/reference >manual. Modula-3's is under 60 pages, IIRC, much smaller than Ada's. >And Wirth was some kind of advisor to the M3 design team. Why is that the principal criterium? >M2 and M3 are both very nice languages if you want something simpler >than Ada and don't need what they leave out. But neither one shows >much sign of life. That's true. This is the reason I started with Pascal again. Commercially there are still two fairly decent M2 compilers (XDS and StonyBrook), but I didn't want a commercial compiler. >All three of these languages, M2, M3, and Ada, now support generics, >and that gives them a big advantage over Delphi for coding without doing >aribtrary conversions between data types. Could you elaborate on this? >program must cast it to whatever type it really represents. One big >reason Borland's Pascal became popular was because it let you go >around Pascal's strict type checking, but that was years ago, BP was usable at a time that very strict principals (in either libraries, typing etc) were simply to slow. IIRC Borland didn't only strip some typing, but a lot of other features that stood in the way of fast programs. (e.g. interprocedural goto's?) > and it's >regrettable to have to routinely write code that will be checked >for correctness at run time when there are less worrisome alternatives. Of course in a standard Delphi program those stress tested VCL classes are used mostly. >I don't believe that Wirth's versions of M2 or Pascal allowed any way >to go around the type system, and in M3, the modules that might do >so must be marked as unsafe. Ada does allow unchecked conversions.