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