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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,21960280f1d61e84 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: How come Ada isn't more popular? References: <1169531612.200010.153120@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1169588206.234714.312650@k78g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1169624573.534128.172610@s48g2000cws.googlegroups.com> <87sle0sv9o.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> <87mz48oajt.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> From: Markus E Leypold Organization: N/A Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 15:49:04 +0100 Message-ID: User-Agent: Some cool user agent (SCUG) Cancel-Lock: sha1:TYyU5NRZ8k30Tj7OrV9SSyDPXLc= MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii NNTP-Posting-Host: 88.72.216.226 X-Trace: news.arcor-ip.de 1169649868 88.72.216.226 (24 Jan 2007 15:44:28 +0200) X-Complaints-To: abuse@arcor-ip.de Path: g2news2.google.com!news1.google.com!news2.google.com!news.germany.com!solnet.ch!solnet.ch!newsfeed.arcor-ip.de!news.arcor-ip.de!not-for-mail Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:8486 Date: 2007-01-24T15:49:04+01:00 List-Id: Ludovic Brenta writes: > Markus E Leypold writes: > >> Hi Ludovic, >> >> Ludovic Brenta writes: >> >>> kevin cline writes: >>>> But the point was that expressiveness drives programmers to new >>>> languages, and Ada isn't particularly expressive. >>> >>> On the contrary, I think that Ada is the most expressive language >>> around. >> >> If I were in the business of language advocacy as some people in this >> thread obviously are, I'd now cry: "FUD!!" > [...] >> I do not want to denigrate Ada here. But I think judging the place of >> Ada in the world right is more important (or useful to Ada or the >> community) than claming ALL the superlatives for Ada. > > OK, I'll take back what I said above, and replace with "Ada is the > most expressive language I know of." I can't comment on Haskell or > OCaml because I don't know them well enough. Fine. I agree it's the most expressive one of the "classic" imperative Familie, under which I count FORTRAN, C, C++, Modula, Pascal and so on (forgive me, there is a similarity, so I think it makes sense for a rough classification to put all those languages into a big super-family, as opposed to in example the more or less functional languages from LISP to Haskell). >> >> >> You're sure you're not confusing verbosity with "expressiveness"? :-) >> > > No, but there is bound to be some correlation. Expressiveness is the > ability to carry a lot of information across to the human programmer > as well as to the compiler. Verbosity, or its opposite conciseness, > is the density of that information, as in "information units per line > of code" or some such ill-defined measure. Difficult. With time I've learnt to like the type inference and annotations of Ocaml + Haskell and starting to get annoyed by the Pascal style. Here verbosity buys me hardly anything and leaves me with the necessity to state and restate the same thing everywhere. So no: There is a correlation between verbosity and expressiveness, but not a very strict one. > > Ada is more expressive than C because it allows programmes to express > more information. In a way, it is also more concise in that Ada I admit it has a richer, type system which allows to express more details. > compilers insert all sorts of implicit checks, and in that Ada has > built-in constructs like tasking, array slices and return of Those I wouldn't count towards expressiveness, only as more functionality in the standard runtime. > dynamically-sized objects that require much more lines of code to > achieve in C. More power. Regards -- Markus