From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,c406e0c4a6eb74ed X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!news.glorb.com!newsfeed.pionier.net.pl!news.nask.pl!newsfeed.tpinternet.pl!atlantis.news.tpi.pl!news.tpi.pl!not-for-mail From: Wojtek Narczynski Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Formal and informal type systems? (Was: ADA Popularity Discussion Request) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 22:20:39 +0200 Organization: tp.internet - http://www.tpi.pl/ Message-ID: References: <49dc98cf.0408110556.18ae7df@posting.google.com> <6F2Yc.848$8d1.621@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net> <413e2fbd$0$30586$626a14ce@news.free.fr> NNTP-Posting-Host: avk219.neoplus.adsl.tpnet.pl Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: nemesis.news.tpi.pl 1096403045 9278 83.27.44.219 (28 Sep 2004 20:24:05 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@tpi.pl NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 20:24:05 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: Pan/0.14.2 (This is not a psychotic episode. It's a cleansing moment of clarity.) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:4337 Date: 2004-09-28T22:20:39+02:00 List-Id: On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 11:05:21 +0100, Marius Amado Alves wrote: >> Some things I miss in Ada that are available in ML: Higher order >> functions, pattern matching and tuples. > > In Ada you have, respectively: access-to-subprograms types, free pattern > matching libraries e.g. GNAT.Spitbol, free database libraries e.g. Pgsql > or Mneson. I am not saying that Ada should have higher order functions, because it requires garbage collection, but suggesting access-to-subprogram as a replacement for higher order functions is dubious. Suggesting GNAT.Spitbol, or whatever string pattern matching as a replacement for pattern matching on algebraic datatypes is riduculous. Suggesting a database, or database access library as a replacement for a mechanism of constructing new datatypes as carthesian products of existing datatypes is absurd. Unfortunately, your "Whatever you do, do it in Ada" philosophy, you had expressed in another thread, won't let you learn ML and know what you are comparing. Regards, Wojtek