Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?

On Sun, 28 Jan 2007 00:24:27 +0100, Markus E Leypold wrote:

Charles D Hixson <charleshixsn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

It's easier to do simple things in Fortran, C, Pascal, Modula II, PL/I
or even Snobol. Oh, yes, and BASIC, too. (The other current

It's easier to do simple things with languages that have lists in
them. E.g. Lisp or Scheme (or Python for today programmers). No, I
disagree: It's not even easy to do simple things in C: Every time I'm
astounded by the contortions I've to go through for anything involving
strings of varying length (OK, I can work in large statically
allocated buffer, but this simply stinks, since it imposes arbitrary
limits). And very soon the wish comes up not to have to write out
specialized list processing code every time for 'list of ints', 'list
of floats', 'list of strings', 'list of lists of strings', 'list of
trees' etc -- and than you start to suffer and it never ends. There is
no way to write generics in C, to fake them or even graft them onto
the language as an afterthought and use a precompiler or a
preprocessor (I'm perhaps exaggerating here, but the pain is there
nonetheless. I've written those things (a generics "expander" for C
:-) and I think/hope I know about what I'm talking here).

Generics is a wrong answer and always was. As well as built-in lists you
are praising is, because what about trees of strings, trees of lists etc.
You cannot build every and each type of containers in.

Right answers should be a more powerful type system than Ada presently has.
In my view there are three great innovations Ada made, which weren't
explored at full:

1. Constrained subtypes (discriminants)
2. Implementation inheritance without values (type N is new T;)
3. Typed classes (T /= T'Class)

P.S. All strings have fixed length. It is just so that you might not know
the length at some point... (:-))

--
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: How come Ada isnt more popular?
    ... only or get the comfort of unbounded strings. ... It's easier to do simple things with languages that have lists in ... family (including Ada). ...
    (comp.lang.ada)
  • Re: Why arent you upgrading?
    ... type safe, so I am forever either typecasting or creating custom TList ... Float, Integer, Currency, I have lists for all of those too.. ... Yes, Generics still lets you do that, and let you automatically share ... be an insane waste of effort or limit you to strings and pointers. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: Implementing custom containers in Lisp
    ... That's what makes Lisp so very much better than C and ... Other than lists, I include only three other data types, strings, ... no property lists since other languages ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: How come Ada isnt more popular?
    ... are praising is, because what about trees of strings, trees of lists etc. ... a language also shouldn't have strings ... but there are no generics instantiated. ...
    (comp.lang.ada)
  • Re: How come Ada isnt more popular?
    ... are praising is, because what about trees of strings, trees of lists etc. ... the language should not have either X or Y built-in. ... but there are no generics instantiated. ...
    (comp.lang.ada)