Re: How to make Ada a dominant language

["AG" <ang@xtra.co.nz>]

"Russ" <18k11tm001@sneakemail.com> wrote in message
news:3B6842AD.1C56ECBE@sneakemail.com...

> No, it's not that I want something I'm "used to." On the contrary, I
> want to get RID of something I'm tired of: the semicolons in C/C++.

Assembler then? (Various Assemblers may use semicolons too but at
least not for that purpose). They also don't typically like the free-form
text arrangment...

> It would be interesting to add up all the time programmers spend going
> back and putting in semicolons and recompiling after the compiler
> catches their omission. I'll bet it's over a tenth of a percent of the
> programming time (of C/C++ and Ada programmers).

Someone else already posted that missing semicolons is extremely rare,
after all they are there to punctuate what should be punctuated in any case
so they come naturally. But, what about the time spent on going back and
*removing* the extra semicolons I put in in some other compiler that doesn't
like them? And to put the matter in perspective: 0.1% of a (say) 40 hour
working week means 144 seconds per week. I suggest you would have
a very hard time selling that as a major savings to management. And never
mind the phony trick of doing the nation-wide or world-wide totals - in that
case you would also need to convince the nation-wide or world-wide
congregation of managers. 144 seconds eh? What about a minute or two
you spend every time you reboot <<some OS>>?

> But the issue is deeper than that. The unnecessary delays and annoyances
> disturb a programmers continuity. Why do you think "scripting" languages
> are so much better for rapid prototyping?

One thing that often gets forgotten is the meaning of the word "prototype".
It sort of suggests that this isn't a real product - just some sort of a
preliminary
scetch to be thrown out and replaced with a *real* thing. You wouldn't
really
like to drive a prototype car would you? Or fly a prototype plane? Not
unless
that happens to be your job I suppose.

> Eliminating semicolons will not eliminate the compile cycle,
> but it will make it much less annoying, thereby making Ada more
> convenient for another whole class of applications.

It will just move some percentage of the "missing semicolon" errors to the
later
run-time/testing stages. Much more annoying, isn't it?