This is veering out of TCL entirely... begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 12:42:23AM -0700: > Gus Wirth wrote: > >Why doesn't anyone like Ada? > > Ada was meant to accompany Waterfall development and extensive, fixed > specifications. Name somebody *other* than the government who gets to > operate in that environment.
University students. ;-) > Also, Ada's vaunted "reliability" was found to have the same problems as > any other language (See: Ariane 5 explosion). The reliability of the > Space Shuttle software is less about the language than about the process > in which that language is used. I didn't see if in Ada there was a way to catch all exceptions. > Superfically, because Ada isn't succinct. Lines of code productivity is > constant. Verbose languages are less productive. Hence, programmers > shy away from verbose languages. They also tend to shy away from languages that are too succinct; APL is regarded as a monster, despite advocates pointing out that it is very powerful and succinct. > > See: > ...the example looks a bit contrived. Is that actually from production code? > >package Keyboard is > > type Key is tagged private; > > procedure Press (K : in out Key); > >private > > type Key is tagged record > > On-Off : Boolean := False; > > end record; > >end Keyboard; > >package Keyboard.Numbers is -- a child of Keyboard > > type Numeric-Key is new Key with private; > > procedure Press(Number : in out Numeric-Key); > > type Number-Zero is new Key with private; > > procedure Press(Zero: in out Number-Zero); > > type Number-One is new Numeric-Key with private; > > procedure Press(One : in out Number-One); > > -- and so one for all numbers > >private > > type Number-Set is range 0..9; > > type Numeric-Key is new Key with record > > Value : Number-Set; > > end record; > > type Number-Zero is new Numeric-Key with null record; > > type Number-One is new Numeric-Key with null record; > > -- and so on for all numbers > >end Keyboard.Numbers; > If it is, please describe the task, and I'll ask a couple of friends of mine who are Ada fans to come up with a solution. Note that I'm not disputing that Ada is verbose, and I've never programmed in Ada, but that just looks over-the-top... -- There are times when I like static type checking. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
