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From: jcoffin@taeus.com (Jerry Coffin)
Subject: Re: Leading zeros with Int_IO.Put()? Or another package?
Date: 1996/11/21
Message-ID: <MPLANET.3294c204jcoffin989a3e@news.rmi.net>#1/1
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references: <baldwinE0Eq2n.KLB@netcom.com>
 <327FB8A3.745B@itg-sepg.logicon.com> <55ubsh$lh0$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
 <dewar.847457421@merv> <56bi13$3pa$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
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 <56tjrh$4ak$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <56trsm$f5a$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
organization: TAEUS
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.pl1
Date: 1996-11-21T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <56trsm$f5a$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>, 
rav@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au says...

[ rav said ] 
> 	>>Ada clearly failed in this aspect.
> 

[ Richard O'keefe repiled ] 
> 	>This is not clear at all.

[ and rav replied to that: ]
> ---It is abundantly clear that it failed as to ease of writing.
> Various postings suggested that the conversion could be done in up
> to 82 lines of Ada code, whereas PL/I requires one simple line.

Given almost any two programming languages, it's trivial to find a 
construct that's far more difficult to create in one than the other.  
The fact that this particular construct happens to be built into PL/I 
but no Ada proves absolutely _nothing_ about the two languages 
overall.

If we take a single example as indicative of a language in general, 
it's trivial to show that, for instance, C is far more readable than 
BASIC.

Likewise, if you simply take program length as an indication of 
complexity, it's fairly trivial to show that PL/I is generally 
superior to Ada.  However, it's equally trivial to show that APL is 
_dramatically_ superior to either.  Having had to maintain some APL at 
one time, I have to question a premise that leads to that particular 
conclusion.  If you'd like, attempt to translate one simple line of 
APL: `b <- /+ a' (where <- is really a single character) into PL/I, 
and retain full generality.  Here I'm not even trying to pick 
something terribly difficult either - just some _really_ simple APL.

Oh, in case you don't know APL, that sums the members of an array 
named a, and puts the result into a variable named b.  a can be of any 
size and number of dimensions.

-- 
    Later,
    Jerry.