Re: Teaching C/C++ from Ada perspective?

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Sunday, July 8, 2018 at 3:43:48 PM UTC-5, Maciej Sobczak wrote:
> … if the only thing you have on offer is the unprecedented hatred towards C++

I don't hate C++.  My curation of a set of maps to where C++'s landmines are doesn't mean that I •hate• the soil that I walk on; it means that I •love• having both of my legs still attached to my body.

On Monday, July 9, 2018 at 1:13:02 AM UTC-5, Maciej Sobczak wrote:
> On Sunday, July 8, 2018 at 6:17:26 PM UTC-5, Dan'l Miller wrote:
> > On Sunday, July 8, 2018 at 3:43:48 PM UTC-5, Maciej Sobczak wrote:
> > > You might consider C
> > 
> > You misspoke there:  C++, not C.
> 
> Actually, no, I really meant C, not C++
>
> > > to be an ultimate disaster, especially when regarded from the Steelman perspective. 

No, other than C99's restrict keyword being utilized by human beings instead of code generators, I have no strongly-held ill feelings regarding C.  For the problem space that C tries to occupy, C rates a 5 out of 10, I think.  I think that C should have been quite different though.  C's structured-programming-era mission should have been something closer to Robert DeWar's hardware-agnostic assembly language (see below), not C's (mis)applying/force-fitting PDP/11 assembly-language semantics onto all other processors.

Robert B. K. Dewar; Anthony P. McCann (1979). MINIMAL - A Machine Independent Assembly Language. Computer Science Department Technical Report. No. 12. Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

No, the ultimate disaster was having any amount of C compatibility whatsoever in C++ as a wobbly foundation.  Despite its weak-typing looseness flaws, C is a notable 1970s engineering achievement in •minimalism• that did not need C++'s accretions at all to make C not-minimal.  Why accrete •partial• strong typing & a Turing-complete template-engine onto a •minimalistic• weakly-typed language?  That opposite-of-minimalism doesn't even sound like C at all!  That amalgamation doesn't even pass the sniff test for a language that actually facilitates software engineering!  But by golly, that is what the software industry spent untold hundreds of millions (billions?) of dollars doing as its primary activity for over 30 years, except for parade of all the C-esque-syntaxed Bullwinkle* languages that seek to be a critique-of-C++/C++-done-right which has been yet another sequence of ratholes to pour a misspent hundreds of millions of dollars too, trying to rectify the C-is-a-wobbly-foundation bad idea.

* “This time for sure!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYMkuOUAg3M&frags=pl%2Cwn

C's involvement with C++ should have been limited to being the backend of cfront. “"Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out” [due in large part to the gratuitous C-syntactic compatibility] —Bjarne Stroustrup _Design and Evolution of C++_ (1994) page 207 when describing his desire for an R1000-esque system for C++ not reliant on repeated textual re-processing

> > You say this only because not one single entity on the planet ever wrote another/better set of
> > requirements of what is and is not a scientifically-based measurement system of a programming
> > language that facilitates software engineering. 
>
> I have explained that I don't need a *single* measure and since the art of software engineering is
> apparently multi-dimensional, I don't expect a *single* measure to exist in the first place. And if you want
> something "better", you first need another measure to objectively compare different measures in order
> to decide which measure is better.

Well, now there you said something in the vicinity of something with which I agree wholeheartedly:  the SI reference meter rod in Paris is only as good as our ability to empirically quantitatively observe & calculate its fidelity of straightness versus its bentness toward deviance.

Software engineering does in fact need a way to empirically quantitatively observe & calculate fidelity of straightness versus bentness toward deviance.

> Sorry, this discussion is not useful.

Perhaps not to you, but it has been to me:  studying the causes & symptoms of deviance.