Re: basic basic ada question

["Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam.not.jrcarter@acm.not.spam.org>]

Maciej Sobczak wrote:
> 
> It's a bit of overstatement and I, personally, don't find it to be the 
> case. I would rather claim that if someone brings some bad habits from C 
> or C++ to Ada, they were already bad habits in C and C++ anyway.

Well, yes. Overstatement tends to attract the attention, and thus get 
the reader to think about it. Saying "Ada is different from C" is 
obvious, and will be ignored. You'll still get Ada-C, with pointers 
everywhere. Saying "Everything you know from C is wrong" might get him 
looking for ways to do things differently.

> Thinking in Ada is probably the same bad idea as thinking in C or C++ - 
> at least if the final goal is not to have fun with the language (that's 
> also a valid reason to write programs, really), but rather to build good 
> final software. In this latter case thinking in terms of good 
> engineering principles is the keyword - and then either any given 
> language makes the implementation of these principles possible or not. 
> This means that "thinking" in any particular language is already a bad 
> idea and *using* the language to implement the chosen engineering 
> principles is much more correct.

I should have said "the Ada mindset", which is also known as "the SW 
engineering mindset", but when you're knocking out these posts you often 
don't have time to perfect your wording. But ...

Thinking in terms of the language is not as good as thinking in SW 
engineering concepts, but when a person is thinking in C/++, thinking in 
Ada is much closer to those concepts than the way the person is 
thinking. Getting a coder to consider thinking in such concepts is 
harder than getting him to consider thinking in another language. Once 
he starts thinking in Ada, the final step is much easier.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"I was hobbling along, minding my own business, all of a
sudden, up he comes, cures me! One minute I'm a leper with
a trade, next minute my livelihood's gone! Not so much as a
'by your leave!' You're cured, mate. Bloody do-gooder!"
Monty Python's Life of Brian
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