Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!crdgw1!uunet!visix!news From: amanda@visix.com (Amanda Walker) Newsgroups: comp.object Subject: Re: Readability of Ada Message-ID: <1991Apr17.164813.22567@visix.com> Date: 17 Apr 91 16:48:13 GMT References: Sender: news@visix.com Organization: Visix Software Inc., Reston, VA Lines: 53 In article jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM (Jim Showalter) writes: 2) The history of software engineering has been more profoundly warped by the simple fact that most programmers are only hunt-and-peck typists than by anything else. This explains constricted identifier names and an emphasis on notational compaction at the expense of understandability. This I agree with completely. Corollary: the term "verbose", applied to a programming language, is COMPLIMENTARY, not perjorative. Eh, only up to a point. It is possible to be *too* verbose, after all. I don't want my code looking like a Stephen Donaldson novel... :) Writing as well as possible in C, one can still not write programs that are as readable and understandable as programs written in Ada by an equally competent programmer with the same objectives in mind. I have my doubts about this. Comments, choices of identifier names, and code structure far outweigh any features of the language itself. And even looking at the effect those features do have, I'd class C and Ada together, with Scheme, Lisp, or Algol-60 above them. 4) C++ is scant improvement over C in terms of its support for readability. No argument here :). I'd even say it's a step backward, although I do admit to liking // comments. 5) A language does not exist independently from its culture. I disagree with this completely. The culture that has grown up around Ada is, like the language, software engineering oriented. From what I have seen so far, the Ada culture, insofar as it exists, is oriented around government contracting... Your Ada example seems to be something of a red herring; you could write an Ada function that's just as hacky and scrunched up as your C example. Holding these two examples up as equivalent, and thus proving your point, is a straw man argument... -- Amanda Walker amanda@visix.com Visix Software Inc. ...!uunet!visix!amanda -- "I know you're supposed to take life one day at a time -- but lately several days have attacked me at once." --Anonymous