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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,d901a50a5adfec3c X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 1094ba,9f0bf354542633fd X-Google-Attributes: gid1094ba,public From: Craig Burley Subject: Re: Fortran or Ada? Date: 1998/09/24 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 394413959 References: <36068E73.F0398C54@meca.polymtl.ca> <6u8r5o$aa4$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> Organization: Cygnus Support Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran,comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-09-24T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Corey Minyard writes: > Jeff Templon writes: > > > > 2) you have to be more careful since with a big language, it is > > easier to make a mistake in writing the program which turns out > > to be valid syntax for some feature you didn't know about. > > This is not my experience with Ada, but it is with C, a much smaller > language. I've only done this once in Ada (Putting a * instead of a > ** in a type declaration). Only God knows how many times I've done it > in C; I probably can't count that high. It also seemed easy in old > Fortran to write code with unintended consequences. I think this has > much more to do with the good human engineering design of the language > and less to do with the language size. IMO, you're absolutely right. And, yes, a typo such as "**" for "*" should produce a diagnostic, but I suspect both Fortran and C suffer from this sort of thing much more than does Ada, simply because Ada is a more recent language and was, I gather, more thoughtfully designed than some other recent languages. -- "Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful." James Craig Burley, Software Craftsperson burley@gnu.org