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From: arash@jendeh.UUCP (Arash Farmanfarmaian)
Newsgroups: net.unix
Subject: Re: Unix and user friendy systems
Message-ID: <158@jendeh.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 31-May-85 05:36:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: jendeh.158
Posted: Fri May 31 05:36:41 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Jun-85 03:06:45 EDT
References: <11048@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Organization: The Coalition of United Associations
Lines: 36

> human-readable programs at no significant expense in machine efficiency
> is Ada.  I doubt that anyone will challenge that...
>                -- Bob Munck, MITRE

	Yes, I will. As long as you are there why not advocate writing system
 code in Fortran or better even in TPL (for those who are curious TPL is a 
 Pascal based language marketed by Texas Instr.). What you are complaining
 about is a lack of comments in UNIX C code, an understandable complaint.
 There is nothing wrong with C. Any language, undocumented, is a pain in the
 butt to debug. On the other hand I have found that if you know what a 
 program does, even if it is undocumented, it is not too hard to grok the code.
 Also poring through the code, trying to understand it, will do wonders  for
 your understanding of the system.
	ADA is not a particularly clear language either. Being able to code
 new definitions of functions like '+' or '-' can make the code even more
 misleading and un-understandable than C  (unless, again, you know what is
 going on). So please forgive my stubborness but I'll stick with C. At least
 I can debug any damn code written in the language. Also, I have discovered
 that you can trust a C compiler to compile your code. ADA compilers (the
 couple that exist), tend to be too restrictive. When a compiler only
 implements half the specifications of a given language, neither the
 compiler nor the language (which happens to be too complex) is worth
 anything. I'd rather know what I am allowed to do. If you like ADA so much
 take a look at IBM software. They should please you. You never know what you
 can get them to accept either. When you have had to deal with three 
 different compilers for the same language, each with it's own idiosyncresies,
 all on the same machine you'll know what I mean. And understand my love for
 'C.'

			Arash Farmanfarmaian'85
-- 
Arash Farmanfarmaian
...!allegra!princeton!jendeh!arash

		"Any man who lives within his means suffers from a lack of
		imagination"