Re: How to get Ada to ?cross the chasm??

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Paul Rubin" <no.email@nospam.invalid> wrote in message 
news:87lgcszjdn.fsf@nightsong.com...
> "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> writes:
>> A DAG or worse yet, an unstructured graph with circularities, is 
>> precisely
>> the kind of thing I was thinking of when I was talking about "spaghetti
>> data".
>
> I still don't understand this angst about circularities.  Edges in a
> graph are like streets in a city, that let you navigate from one place
> to another.  I don't think the city I live in is "spaghetti" just
> because the street topology is such that it's possible to drive around
> in circles.

You must live in a rare city with almost all grid streets. (And one would 
not represent a grid using a graph!)
Almost any modern suburb have streets that snake around all which ways 
without getting anywhere useful. (Yes, there's usually some sort of trunk, 
but even those are constrained by topography, such as the lakes here in 
Madison.) That's my definition of spaghetti!! (Aside: I got partially lost 
last night coming back from a friend's house because the normal street was 
closed for construction. I followed a street that started south but turned 
east (away from the freeway!) and had no cross streets that went through to 
the south or east. Definitely a form of spaghetti!!)

> ... you end up designing a DSL to make such
> templates.  That's very easy in Lisp but not so easy in Ada.

Says you, who seems to have no idea of what the capabilities of Ada really 
are or how to use it. These sorts of things aren't difficult and one has the 
huge advantage of actually ending up with code that you can understand again 
5 years in the future. You seem to want to program in a particular style 
that comes from some other programming language, expect to get some sort of 
benefits from doing so in Ada, yet don't seem to understand why a different 
style makes more sense for Ada. We made the serious mistake of making 
allowances in the OOP design for such people, and that led to several of the 
worst features of Ada. And those had no impact on the uptake (or lack 
thereof) of Ada. I surely hope that we've (the Ada community) learned better 
by now.

                                 Randy.