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From: Jeffrey Creem <jeff@thecreems.com>
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Subject: Re: Larger matrices
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Date: Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:15:00 GMT
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Jean-Pierre Rosen wrote:
> amado.alves@gmail.com a �crit :
>>>> And Ada got in the way: slicing restricted to one-dimensional arrays!
>>> Compared to other languages that have no slicing at all?
>>
>> There are languages better than Ada at array indexing, including
>> slicing. If there aren't, there should be!
>>
> AFAIK, Fortran90 has very sophisticated slicing of arrays.
> The only thing I heard about it, is that it was so complicated to define 
> and use that it was a major reason why there are so few Fortran90 
> compilers...
> 
> Language design is about balancing features, usefulness, and 
> implementability.

It is also fair to say that the vast majority of the 
programmers/software engineers in the world do a pretty lousy job of 
even using the features they have been given. Putting in a lot of effort 
into some fancy feature that no one uses when that same effort could be 
used to improve reliability, or efficiency, or the IDE, or standard 
libraries is an important consideration.

I am not quite a crusty old programmer yet but I am getting there. I 
have seen a lot of code in a lot of languages from lots of developers, 
organizations, companies, etc. There are always plenty of counter 
examples but the vast majority of the code in the world (including Ada 
code) either ignores or misuses existing programming languages features 
that could/should be used to improve reliability, performance, 
maintainability, etc.

Of course there is a chance that I am just a bad programmer and that is 
why I think that...But since I am getting paid to be a sw engineer and 
guiding/influencing development of plenty of engineers, its fair to say 
that even if I am wrong, then I must be right.