Re: Ada Popularity: Comparison of Ada/Charles with C++ STL (and Perl)

From: Martin Krischik (krischik_at_users.sourceforge.net)
Date: 09/25/04 

Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 16:04:23 +0200

Kevin Cline wrote:

> Martin Krischik <krischik@users.sourceforge.net> wrote in message
> news:<3673998.bj16mkkOu2@linux1.krischik.com>...
>> Matthew Heaney wrote:
>>
>> > If AI-302 doesn't meet your needs, then you need to let us know.
>> > Please peruse the a-c*.ad[sb] sources at the tigris website.  (Note
>> > that I'm still incorporating changes from the most recent ARG
>> > meeting.)
>>
>> I have got my most important baby (indefinite types). And I don't want to
>> confuse the ARG. I fully agree that we need a container library inside
>> the standart.
>>
>> However it would be sad if Ada.Containers would kill off all other
>> container libraries. Just like the STL did.
>
> I think the STL killed off all the other container libraries because
> the STL container/algorithm separation is an extremely powerful design
> that dominates all older container library designs. Certainly STL
> programming is much cleaner and easeir than programming with the once
> popular RogueWave containers. The STL also has the advantage that it
> is relatively easy to write new containers that will work with the STL
> algorithms, so that even though new containers are written, they all
> look like STL containers.

No Library is perfect, but the "I which I had" list for the STL is much
larger then for container out of IBM's OCL. The OCL was not designed for
academic correctness bit but for usability.

>> Im am sill looking at IBM OCL thinking
>> how much more practical it was. std::string might me academicly correct
>> but IString was a lot more usefull in day to day live with all the asInt
>> (), asUnsigned (), asAnythingYouEverNeed() methods.
>
> The problem with that design is that it isn't readily extensible to
> accomodate user-defined types, and it makes generic programming very
> difficult.

In 99.99% of all cases I don't need strings on user defined types. I need
base_string<char>. I can see that I one day might need
base_string<wchar_t>, but I have not until now. They made all that funky
design which I just never need. And for that:

int
string::asInt();
  throw (bad_value);

and

explicit
string::string (int value)
   throw();

are missing. Two functions I am missing on daily basis. Sure, I am an
experienced programmer, I can do that myself - but a proper library should
have all the function one need on a daily basis.

And they could have had both:

class string:
public: base_string<char>
  {
  public:

  int
  string::asInt()
    throw (bad_value);

  explicit
  string (int value)
     throw();
  }

Would have been so easy, so usefull but it would not have been a template.
The "all is template" religion got in there way.

And just for the record: atio is a C function - you need the overhead of
convertion the std::string into a char* and std::strstream seem quite heavy
weight for just a simple task of convertion a string from and to an int.

With Regards

Martin 

-- 
mailto://krischik@users.sourceforge.net
http://www.ada.krischik.com

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