Structure Comparison (ADA vs C)

[mike at taurus.UUCP]

Ah, dear me. Here starteth another holy war, but I always was one to enjoy
a fight.

ADA is simply a BIG improvement on C. I've smiled a lot recently at some of
the things that have turned up in this column -- watched the debate about
parameter matching for function calls -- what sort cast should be applied
to functions returning nothing -- comparison of structures -- the ill-designed
'switch' selectors, 'break' and 'continue's -- introduction of complex numbers,
etc. etc. .

The one point that comes up time and again is that the people submitting to
the debate are arguing about problems that have already been solved. If you
want to see the way that all the stuff mentioned above can be done cleanly,
efficiently and portably, then go read the ADA Reference Manual, or at least
a primer on the language. Until you have done that, you are simply contributing
noise, not real debatable opinion.

You want my opinion? Well you get it anyway.
C is outdated. It is a poor language for quick, reliable implementation of
portable applications programs. It works well enough for small bit-twiddling
coding, but leaves too many minefields for even the experienced programmers
to walk into.
ADA is the best, safest way of expressing algorithms and data structures that
I have seen yet. It is the result of painstaking effort by better informed
language designers than almost any of the contributors to this newsgroup (I
include myself in that description).
It beats the pants off C for most work -- a shame that its concurrency
(its most talked about point) is unlikely to be up to scratch for serious
real time use. GO AWAY AND LEARN IT. Your C might even be better afterwards.

Please reply by sending personal abuse to the 'junk' newsgroup. Intelligent,
well informed argument is welcome.

-- 

Mike Banahan
{ENGLAND}!ukc!root44!taurus!mike