Re: Ada Popularity: Comparison of Ada/Charles with C++ STL (and Perl)

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

James Alan Farrell <anonymous@anonymous.com> writes:

> The things that make a language a "good" language are many and
> complex, and are different in different circumstances.  If I need a
> small utility that compares lines in different text files, I find
> perl much easier than Ada.  On the other hand, if I have a very
> large project that must always perform "correctly", I've not found a
> language that can beat Ada.

Even I would accept that Ada may just not be the best language in the
world for text processing!

We needed a program to remove the private part of a package spec; the
winner was the one-line sed script you can select off the Wiki and
paste into an xterm.

And there's the Ada line counter (which includes semicolons in
comments and strings but is still useful):

  $ tr -cd ';' <bcwords.ada | wc -c

(by the way, that shows that the Booch Components version of the word
counter comes in at 123 lines).

As you say, there's a boundary somewhere between those and the missile
guidance system where the choices change.

-- 
Simon Wright                               100% Ada, no bugs.