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From: kevin.cline@gmail.com (Kevin Cline)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada Popularity: Comparison of Ada/Charles with C++ STL (and Perl)
Date: 23 Sep 2004 01:51:33 -0700
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Date: 2004-09-23T01:51:33-07:00
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Bj�rn Persson <spam-away@nowhere.nil> wrote in message news:<11b4d.3849$d5.30042@newsb.telia.net>...
> Kevin Cline wrote:
> 
> > Ada/Charles 158 lines, 9 files
> > C++         76 lines
> > Perl        14 lines
> 
> Neat. Now let's take three identical persons who haven't seen this 
> program before, give them one version each, and see how long it takes 
> them to understand it.
> In other words: What matters is how easy the program is to read and 
> maintain. 

I quite agree, and on that score the Perl code wins hands down. 
Anyone with a couple of months of Perl experience could understand the
Perl program in about two minutes, and a halfway decent Perl
programmer should be able to write that code in about ten minutes.  It
took me a bit longer because I had forgotten how to call sort and had
to look it up.
  
It's pretty hard to make the case that this Ada code:

  procedure Insert (Word : String) is 
    I : Wordcount_Maps.Iterator_Type; 
    B : Boolean; 
    type Element_Access is access all Wordcount_Maps.Element_Subtype;

    for Element_Access'Storage_Size use 0;

    function To_Access is new Wordcount_Maps.Generic_Element
(Element_Access);
  
  begin -- Insert 
    Insert (Map, To_Lower (Word), 0, I, B); 
    declare E : Wordcount_Maps.Element_Subtype renames To_Access
(I).all;
    begin 
      E := E + 1; 
    end; 
  end Insert;

is easier to understand than the corresponding C++ code:
  ++concordance[word];

or the corresponding Perl code:
  ++$count{$word};