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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: The future of Ada is at risk
Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2008 10:16:00 -0500
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Date: 2008-01-05T10:16:00-05:00
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Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> writes:

> Agyaras writes:
>> 4) Ada limitations. Certain aspects of Ada are painfully clumsy. The
>> three string libs, unnecessary multitude of I/O libs, primitive
>> exception handling, constructors are not part of the language,
>> finalization is an afterthought,....
>
> These can be explained with a simple philosophy: if you don't need
> some feature, then Ada does not force you to pay the price for it.
> That's why unbounded strings are not the same as simple or bounded
> strings; that's why finalization is optional.

Well, it explains why unbounded strings are different from fixed-length
strings.  It does not explain why unbounded strings use such painful
syntax.

The complaint about exceptions is valid.

I don't understand the complaint about constructors -- Ada 2005 is
pretty good in this area (better than C++, IMHO).

I'm not sure I understand the finalization issue.  Yes, of course it's
optional, as you explained.  But Agyaras complains that it's an
"afterthought".  Is the problem that Finalize doesn't automatically
invoke the parent's Finalize?  Or something else?

- Bob