Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?

[Charles D Hixson <charleshixsn@earthlink.net>]

Gautier wrote:
> Charles D Hixson:
> 
>> Ada is quite expressive, but it can be very clumsy when you want to 
>> write a flexible routine.  You can do it, and you can do it with much 
>> greater safety, but it takes more work.
>>
>> Just, for instance, look at the Ada version of:
>> #include  <stdio.h>
>> void main()  {  print ("Hello", " ", "World!");    exit(0);  }
> 
> with Ada.Text_IO;
> procedure pied is begin Ada.Text_IO.Put("Hello" & " " & "World!"); end;
> 
> Is it so clumsy ?
> ______________________________________________________________
> Gautier         -- http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/index.htm
> Ada programming -- http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/gsoft.htm
> 
> NB: For a direct answer, e-mail address on the Web site!
Sorry, I knew I shouldn't have used that example.  (Of course, 
maybe it's the texts I'm looking at for Ada...).

But I was intentionally NOT concatenating the strings. 
Perhaps if the central string were a number?  or an unbounded 
string instead of a fixed string?  Or perhaps my concerns are 
those of a neophyte...but I've got around 8 texts, and they 
all use that verbose form...Thus:

with Ada.Text_IO;
use Ada.Text_IO;
procedure pied is
begin
   Put("Hello ");
   Put(3);
   put("World!");
   newline;
end pied;

I acknowledge that this vertical separation is optional ... 
but doesn't the put(3) need to be a separate print statement?
(And now that my C is coming back to me a bit the C print 
statement should have been:
printf("Hello, %d %s\n", 3, "World");

As shown by the silly mistake that I made in C, it's not my 
favorite language.  But when I compare a book on expert 
systems written in C and one written in Ada (well, Ada83), the 
book in Ada is both thicker and has more pages devoted to code 
than the book in C, and the expert systems are approximately 
of equivalent power (i.e., toy systems).   Well, the type size 
is a trifle larger, and the paper a bit thicker...so the 
comparison isn't quite as straightforward as I'm making it 
out, but basically Ada83 appears to take approx 1.5 times as 
many lines to do the same thing.  (I didn't count the lines. 
It's a rough estimate.  Say somewhere between 1.1 and 1.9 
times as many lines.)  Possibly this is a comment on the 
skills of the authors, but the number of extensive comparisons 
I've encountered is very limited.  (Or maybe it's a comment on 
Ada83, and doesn't apply to Ada95.)