[cpp-threads] meta-question about Ada

[Boehm, Hans]

> I am not an authoritative source for why people do not like Ada.
> I am one of those in the opposite camp. Many people in 
> academia seem to
> look at the military background of Ada and reject the language on that
> basis. The assumption often seems to be that nothing useful can come
> from the military, so why bother with Ada.
> 
As someone who has been watching this from the sidelines for a long
time,
but was never seriously involved with Ada, my impression is that it has
a few strikes against it, which are mostly unrelated to the
actual strengths of the current language:

1) In my view, the pre-1995 version of the language had some
deficiencies
that rendered it unusable for many of us. (Notably, no function pointers
or real equivalent.)  Thus many of us gave up on it before the "real"
version of the language appeared.

2) The standard seems to go out of its way to use its own unique
terminology,
causing probably unnecessary communication problems with the rest of us.

3) It doesn't use C syntax.

Hans