🚀 go-pugleaf

henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
> xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
>> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>>>... A standard is useful only if it is widely accepted.  It cannot
>>>become widely accepted without support from compiler writers.  Trying
>>>to ram things down the compiler writers' throats with standards simply
>>>does not work; all it does is eliminate the usefulness of the standard.
>>
>>I offer the Ada language as an absolute counterexample to your argument.
>
>I wasn't aware that Ada was useful.

Well, I wrote a moderately interesting set of packages in it to support
graph theory research, so it hasn't been completely useless to me, at
least.

Ada tends to support the "if it ever makes it past the damned compiler,
it will run just fine" school of program implementation, as opposed to C,
which supports the "rolling around in concertina is fun, really" school
of programming.

I haven't decided yet where C++ falls in that spectrum, but so far the
barbed wire is winning out.

In any case, the amount of pain cause to compiler writers by the Ada
standard is a matter of record; many claimed it was impossible to write
an efficient compiler.  Yet now, hundreds exist, without compromises
with the compiler standard's requirements having been done in the name
of easing the compiler writers' lives.

My opinions on Ada's visibility rules, and other intense obscurities,
on the other hand, aren't printable.

All I can say is, C++ seems headed down the same slippery slope of a
language too unintuitive for widespread use.  I just wish, for both
Ada and C++, that comprehensibility of the rules had been made a
paramount goal.  The nicest thing about Pascal and Modula-2 is that
a moderately experienced programmer can fairly easily intuit what a
piece of code is doing.  I don't find that true for Ada or C++, and
it took me far too long to get that comfortable with C.  Ossified
synapses, probably.

Sigh.  Off to the language wars.  This isn't worth following up.

Try really hard not to do so.

Kent, the man from xanth.
<xanthian@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian@well.sf.ca.us>