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Samuel Mize <[log in to unmask]>
Thu, 8 Oct 1998 14:40:05 -0500
text/plain (74 lines)
Michael Feldman wrote:
> C++ is less verbose?

Well, C is less verbose, if by "verbose" you mean "requires more
keystrokes for procedural code."  This is the old "keywords vs
punctuation" argument.

If you spend most of your coding time typing, and you're not very
good at typing, it's much faster to type

  main ()
  {putc('c');}

(21 characters) instead of

  procedure main is
  begin
    put ('c');
  end main;

(47 characters).

Of course, if you spend more time thinking than typing when you write
code, or if you learned to touch-type, this advantage is pretty faint.

I'm not sure how to compare the "verbosity" of

  task X;
  task body X is
  begin
    [code]
  end X;

against whatever system-specific things you'd have to use to get
multi-tasking in C or C++ or whatever.

But wait, that doesn't count because, uh, I forget but it doesn't count.
And it makes Ada too big too!  Yeah!  And who wants multitasking anyway?
We have window-event loops instead!  UHH -- OK, the meds are kicking in.

On another note:

> This is a vicious circle: students and teachers ignore Ada because there
> are "no Ada jobs." Employers ignore Ada because "there are no qualified
> people." Both are half-true. There are plenty of people, and a reasonable
> number of jobs. Matching them up is apparently quite hard.

When exactly did we lose the distinction between Colleges and Universities,
on the one hand, and vo-tech schools on the other?  Did C and Lisp and
Pascal catch on at Universities because of all the jobs?  No, when they
got popular, the real jobs were in Cobol and Assembler.  When C++ caught
on at the Universities, the jobs were in C and Pascal.  Those languages
caught on because they were worthwhile, because they had something in
them that was worth teaching.

Hopefully the existence of open-source compilers like GNAT will get more
University people interested in a language that integrates:

- good introductory software engineering support like Pascal
- multitasking
- object-oriented programming, INTEGRATED with procedural programming!
etc.

At least, it should appeal to those professors who remember that they
aren't at vo-tech schools, and who are more interested in teaching
students than getting consulting and project contracts.

Best,
Sam Mize

--
Samuel Mize -- [log in to unmask] (home email) -- Team Ada
Fight Spam: see http://www.cauce.org/ \\\ Smert Spamonam

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