On 06/10/2010 22:48, bearophile wrote:
Bruno Medeiros:
[About ADA] That "begin" "end<name of block>" syntax is awful. I already think just "begin"
"end" syntax is bad, but also having to repeat the name of block/function/procedure/loop at the "end", that's
awful.<
If you take a look at my dlibs1, probably more than 60_000 lines of D1 code,
you may see that all closing braces of templates, functions, classes, and
structs have a comment like:
} // end FooBar!()
Ada makes sure that comment at the end doesn't get out of sync with the true
function mame :-)
I agree it's not DRY, but when you aren't using a good IDE that comment helps
you understand where you are in the code.
Well, I rarely use languages without good IDE's, so... :P
But still, even with IDEs aside, I see little use in that kind of
information comment. But I try to keep my functions short, both in
lines, and depth of nested blocks. And as for aggregate types, of those
that have large amount of code, I prefer that there are only a few of
them per source file. So this makes it rare that I'm not able to see the
whole block in one page.
That dlibs1 of yours, is it publicly available somewhere? "Let me see
your micro..."
Ada is not designed to write Web applications, it's useful where you need very
reliable software, high integrity systems. And in such situations it's very
hard to beat it with other languages as C/C++/Java/C#. In such situations a
language that helps you avoid bugs is better than a very handy language like
Ruby. C language was not designed to write reliable systems, and it shows. D2
language distances itself from C, trying to be (useful to write code) more
reliable than C, it uses some of the ideas of Ada (but D2 misses still a basic
Ada feature important for highly reliable software systems: optional integral
overflows, that in Ada are active on default).
I'm not an expert on high-reliability/critical systems, but I had the
impression that the majority of it was written in C (even if with
restricting code guidelines). Or that at least, much more critical
software is written in C than in Ada. Is that not the case?
--
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer
