> > Pro: Supports and encourages highly readable, maintainable code.
> > Con: Verbose.
>
> I disagree.  Well-written C is almost as readable as typical Ada, and
> neither is "verbose."  To me, "verbose" Ada is where the programmer thinks
> a "meaningful name" for a variable or loop label is a full English
> sentence.  The result makes the containing code almost as hard to read as
> most C code.

I spent several years at Intergraph Corp. doing development support and several
years before that porting third party applications to Unix.  From that
experience I find the term "Well Written C" to be somewhat of an oxymoron.  Only
the most disciplined developers produced "well written C".  They were few and
far between.

> > Pro: Parallel constructs built in to the language.
> > Con: Tasking code is large.
>
> Is this really true?  And even if it is, how much smaller is code in
> another language containing calls to "outside" multi-threading libraries?

C++ support for multi-threading is not built in but requires special
platform specific libraries.  It is no surprise that multi-threaded C++ code
does not follow any concept of small code.

I have seen one implementation of C that "provided" object oriented constructs.
 The resulting code was larger than similar Ada or C++.  So much for the
efficient code of C.

> > Pro: Strict bounds rules allow compiler to build in automatic
> >      "debugging" software.
> > Con: Unoptimized code is large and slow.

This is compiler not language dependent.  I have unoptimized Ada that runs as
fast as C.  I have some optimized C that is slower that both unoptimized Ada or
C.

Phil Johnson