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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: How to get Ada to ?cross the chasm??
Date: Wed, 09 May 2018 19:07:37 -0700
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Date: 2018-05-09T19:07:37-07:00
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Luke A. Guest <laguest@archeia.com> writes:
>> One can get philosophical but I wouldn't say they are.  
> And you’re wrong.

Well, that's philosophical, but I think of nested functions and scopes
as one of Algol's defining features.  Pascal has them, Ada has them, C
doesn't have them, C++ didn't have them until C++11 lambdas made it so
it sort of half-assedly has them now.

>>> I would say Ada’s a much higher level language than C++.
> It’s not a flamewar, try the language, you’ll see.

Do you have an example?

> But Ada’s package system helps here as it’s more robust

True.  There's a modules proposal for C++ but it is probably a ways out.

>>> I still say it has the best data structuring abilities of any language.
> As in sizing, alignment and placement. See representation clauses.

Sounds like PL/I but Ada seems to be missing decimal representation ;).

> I didn’t mention lists. You mentioned compiling the language, I’m talking
> about parsing the source which is part of the compilation process.

I just mean GNAT is a big system.  I had to install 50+ of MB of Debian
packages (using 100s of MB of disk) in order to compile the CBSG.  By
comparison the Picolisp package (picolisp.com) is 825KB and includes a
database, GUI app framework, Prolog engine, etc.

Of course an Ada compiler could be a lot smaller than GNAT, though
probably not as small as this: http://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

> You don’t do this in Ada, because it’s not retarded. Not everything is
> an object. Not everything is a function.

The trend in C++ is to move away from OOP towards template generics,
which are descended from Ada generics.  This guy worked on both and the
interview is interesting:

 http://stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html