munck@mitre-bedford.ARPA (05/29/85)
> Ada?? You gotta be kidding.. > > There is NO programming language that can force coders to write good > code. Good programming is possible in C and not even as difficult as > in many Pascal-based languages. Ditto for bad programming. Read my lips. I said >> In my opinion, the language that best supports writing of superbly >> human-readable programs at no significant expense in machine >> efficiency is Ada. I doubt that anyone will challenge that... It may be possible in C, but it is both difficult and rare. I'd be hard put to find a significant piece of code in UNIX that I'd call a good example of easy-to-read code. Any nominations from the community? -- Bob Munck
ron@BRL.ARPA (Ron Natalie) (05/29/85)
And if the people who wrote UNIX had done it in Ada, it wouldn't be any better. Ada lends itself to the ideosyncratic programming conventions that are one of the problems in C as well. Get one of the hacking OS programmers writing in Ada and he can do the same as if he were, if he were doing it in assembly. -Ron
emery@gypsy.UUCP (05/31/85)
I, for one, would like to see some of these ideosyncratic conventions
in Ada, that rival the set in C.
for instance, consider looping through the characters of a string....
for (a_char = *str_ptr++, !a_char;)
compared to
for char_index in a_string'length loop
a_char := a_string(char_index);
Which do you understand better?
It is certainly possible to write crapola in any language. However, no
language (that I know) can match C for its "rich" set of conventions and
aliasing.
Dave Emery
{princeton!ihnp4}!siemens!emeryshap@bunker.UUCP (Joseph D. Shapiro) (06/13/85)
> > >> In my opinion, the language that best supports writing of superbly > >> human-readable programs at no significant expense in machine > >> efficiency is Ada. I doubt that anyone will challenge that... > > It may be possible in C, but it is both difficult and rare. I'd be hard > put to find a significant piece of code in UNIX that I'd call a good > example of easy-to-read code. Any nominations from the community? > -- Bob Munck It is both possible AND easy in C, but it is rare. I think that this is because it is even easier to write kludges in C. Also, don't take UNIX source as good examples of readable C; most 'user' programs I've seen, even some of the worst ones, are more readable. We are about to enforce a 'readability' standard here... results may be posted at some later date.