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-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,103b407e8b68350b X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-01-04 10:05:46 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!logbridge.uoregon.edu!newshub.sdsu.edu!news-xfer.cox.net!p01!news2.central.cox.net.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: Ted Dennison User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Anybody in US using ADA ? One silly idea.. References: <3E147D79.2070703@cogeco.ca> <4519e058.0301031434.51a0c880@posting.google.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Date: Sat, 04 Jan 2003 18:04:12 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 68.12.51.201 X-Complaints-To: abuse@cox.net X-Trace: news2.central.cox.net 1041703452 68.12.51.201 (Sat, 04 Jan 2003 13:04:12 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 04 Jan 2003 13:04:12 EST Organization: Cox Communications Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:32535 Date: 2003-01-04T18:04:12+00:00 List-Id: Kevin Cline wrote: > With no access to subprogram types, attaching Ada-83 subprograms to > widget callbacks was a real puzzle for me. At the time I was doing Damn near every compiler realised that fairly early on, and provided a (non-standard) way to do that, documented in Appendex F (if I remember correctly). However, 1988 is before my time, so I don't know if it counts as "fairly early on". > near the quality of the free GNU C compiler. Within a week of > starting > to program in Ada I found legal code that one or the other compiler > rejected. That's hardly anything you wouldn't have to deal with using C though. I believe there *was* a C standard in 88, but you wouldn't have known it to look at the compilers available. The same goes today for C++. The most commonly used C++ compiler today (MSVC++ 6.0) is just barely over 60% compliant, which means its barely more of a C++ compiler than not. I can tell you from sad experience that trying anything more than the most basic of the STL examples in Stroustrup's book will fail miserably with it. > work. But most > of the problems with C were solved by the introduction of C++. Having worked with both, I'd say that is just true. However, 60% less of C's language-induced problems is not near enough. Plus, C++ adds several new ones of its own, and even makes some of C's existing problems far worse. (eg: Now unexpected implicit type casts can happen with *any* type, not just the numeric ones) > Today, the features that Ada provides have little value > compared with the features that C++ provides and Ada lacks: > the STL, automatic template function instantiation, smooth I'd agree a bit with that. However, MSVC++ 6 doesn't really have this feature either. A large amount of the compilers that do have it, do it differently from each other. That effectively means you can't count on it in portable code. That's why rule #1 in the Mozilla C++ portability guide is "Don't use C++ templates". (see http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/portable-cpp.htmll#dont_use_templates) > integration of user-defined and primitive datatypes, and > bindings to every API in existence. I don't really consider this an issue. Bindings to anything that has a C interface are almost trivial to generate.