Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!lll-winken!ubvax!igor!rutabaga!jls From: jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM (Jim Showalter) Newsgroups: comp.object Subject: Re: Readability of Ada Message-ID: Date: 19 Apr 91 01:18:43 GMT References: <1991Apr17.164813.22567@visix.com> Sender: news@Rational.COM Lines: 45 % 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. One person I know says C++ is indistiguishable from line noise... % 5) A language does not exist independently from its culture. % %I disagree with this completely. Why? All the style guides, training courses/books, idioms, lore, etc are all essentially cultural artifacts. % 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... There is nothing contradictory between government contracting and software engineering. Indeed, it turns out to be darned close to impossible to succesfully complete a project as big as the FAA rewrite of all flight control software WITHOUT software engineering. I doubt the average hacker could even begin to start to comprehend the scale and complexity of the sort of projects the government undertakes. Getting a 45KSLOC C application running isn't even CLOSE. %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. I could, but that's not my point. My point is: here is some Ada written to be readable. It implements essentially the same algorithm as the C code I presented earlier. Given that the C code presented earlier was grungy, I INVITE all those C folks out there to submit examples in response that are as UN-grungy as they are capable of making them. It is my claim that even these examples will not be as readable as the Ada example I posted. -- * The opinions expressed herein are my own, except in the realm of software * * engineering, in which case I borrowed them from incredibly smart people. * * * * Rational: cutting-edge software engineering technology and services. *