🚀 go-pugleaf

   Ted Dunning and another person who sent e-mail seem to believe
   that I am of the view that Ada 83 has no significant limitations,
   which is not the case.  One major limitation is the fact that
   it is not possible to obtain record attributes such as the number
   of fields and the name of each field, thus effectively making it
   impossible to construct a generic report generator which, given an
   arbitrary record type, will allow the user to create a report in
   which the column headers are essentially the field names, the columns
   are automatically arranged across the page, etc., by simply
   instantiating the generic on the desired record type and passing
   the instantiated procedure the name of a file containing records
   of the appropriate type.  This has been submitted as an Ada 9X
   revision request, and will undoubtedly be corrected in due course. 

   Fortunately, very few such limitations exist, and I consider it
   an outstanding programming language despite the inevitable presence
   of scattered imperfections.  In practice, I have not found them to
   be significant enough to cause much concern beyond ensuring that 
   the appropriate Ada 9X revision request is filed; certainly the
   power that Ada 83 provides is more than enough to keep me busy 
   until the Ada 9X revision process has completed.   

   Certainly software components can be written in other languages;
   I explicitly structured the definition of this newsgroup's scope
   in a language-independent manner.  Due to the diversity of languages
   which support reuseability to varying extents (Ada, C++, Eiffel,
   Smalltalk, and Modula-N, to name a few), specific examples will
   undoubtedly continue to be written in whatever the author's favorite 
   language (and latest version number, in the case of the "moving targets")
   happens to be.   


   Bill Wolfe, wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu