Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!enea!sommar
From: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Ada vs C++
Message-ID: <4116@enea.se>
Date: 30 Nov 88 21:10:37 GMT
Organization: ENEA DATA AB, Sweden
Lines: 56

Once again Ted Holden, HTE uses Bob Burch's account (bob@imspw6.UUCP):
>>you talk (write) too much and you say too little. What is worse, you say that
>>you do not know what you are talking about.
> 
>Is this supposed to be an English sentence?  I've never accused MYSELF of
>not knowing what I'm talking about.....

Well, we didn't say you were aware of it.

>>Probably, with today's computers you
>>have to resort to the target systems own process handling if you
>>want to write a fast multi-tasking application in Ada for a system
>>like Unix or VMS. Not really satisfactory. but what other options
>>does other langauges offer you?
> 
>The readers of this group all know the answer to this one and I won't
>repeat it.  The funny thing is, Ada was INTENDED to be the one language
>which could run on EVERY computer, from embedded system to mainframe, and
>handle ALL applications;  

Now what did I say? I said that you couldn't expect the real-time  
primitives in Ada to work very well with a time-sharing system.
They work, in the sense you can still do multi-tasking, but unless
your performance requirements are low, they are maybe not that 
useful. On the other hand, if you take your beloved C++ and rely
on system calls, they may or may not be around when you move from your
time-sharing box where you developed to the naked taget machine.
  So, if you thought you find a good point here, I have to disappoint
you: Ada works very well on Unix and VMS for general applications.

>What I've been trying to point out is that C++ CAN meet that spec.  C++
>actually IS the language Ada was supposed to be and never will be, the
>main language which DOD (and a lot of other organizations) need.

(Hm, let's see. He intimated that Ada didn't work with Unix since
its real-time primitives didn't work well with Unix. Since C++,
as far as I know, doesn't have any real-time support at all, that
language couldn't be useful either. Or?)

Seriously I am not going to argue against the paragraph above. I
know too little about C++ to do that. (And Mr. Holden knows little 
too about Ada to argue against that.) C++ may be a better langauge 
than Ada, what do I know. Certainly Ada has some drawbacks:
* It *is* big and complex, which gives it the advantage of being 
  very powerful. Remember that this is a langauge for *big* projects. 
  But of course the complexity and the varities raise cause to uncertainty.
* There is no dynamic binding. This was very unfortunately strongly 
  forbidden in the original requirements. If the language designers
  had been permitted to design an object-oriented langauge from the
  start, the could have come up with something much cleaner.
And compared to old languages like Pascal and C, I take Ada on day.
-- 
Erland Sommarskog
ENEA Data, Stockholm
sommar@enea.se
"Frequently, unexpected errors are entirely unpredictable" - Digital Equipment