Re: Ada ad in Embedded Systems Programming stinks

[eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)]

In article <DAG.94Sep8090447@bellman.control.lth.se> dag@control.lth.se (Dag Bruck) writes:

 > I digress; I would instead point out that there are significant
 > differences between C and C++, and several postings on comp.lang.ada
 > do C++ unjustice by taking problems in C and transfering them to C++...

 > Finally a comment on the Ada/C/C++ "language wars:" I think the issue
 > is to use C++ instead of C, not to use C++ instead of Ada, at least
 > for the great majority of programmers.

   Hmmm...  I will reply, but mildly.  I have found several areas where C
is a better implementation language than Ada.  Since Ada is much
better at programming in the large, this generally leads to large Ada
applications with perhaps one or two percent of the unit bodies
written in C.  Of course when interfacing to large bodies of legacy C
code, these numbers go up.

   However, when I have tried to use C++, the only advantages over Ada
83 lie in areas where other Ada 83 features make Ada the better
choice.  (Yes doing OOP in Ada 83 is painful, but I never found a way
to use C++ OOP and encapsulate it.  So the entire program structure
must be in C++, and except on small projects, where the benefits of
OOP are not that great, I'd much rather use Ada for program structure.)
With Ada 9X now here, I get all of the advantages of C++ and none of
the drawbacks--even if I don't use tagged types.  (Generic package
parameters and generic derived type parameters are enough to make
static typed OOP work nicely.  And I much prefer to use static typing
when possible.  Of course, in Ada 9X, I have a choice...) 

   So even with C++ as a completely viable language choice, I never
choose it.  But I still sometimes use C.  (And wash my hands
afterwards. ;-) For that matter I still use APL and Lisp, and if I had
a good Algol W compiler for a modern processor, I might use that to.
(Why Algol W and not Pascal or Modula?  There are times when real call
by name and own variables are useful, but everything in Pascal and
Modula can be found in Ada.)

--

					Robert I. Eachus

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