wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu (Bill Wolfe) (06/20/89)
Ted Dunning and another person who sent e-mail seem to believe that I am of the view that Ada 83 has no significant limitations, which is not the case. One major limitation is the fact that it is not possible to obtain record attributes such as the number of fields and the name of each field, thus effectively making it impossible to construct a generic report generator which, given an arbitrary record type, will allow the user to create a report in which the column headers are essentially the field names, the columns are automatically arranged across the page, etc., by simply instantiating the generic on the desired record type and passing the instantiated procedure the name of a file containing records of the appropriate type. This has been submitted as an Ada 9X revision request, and will undoubtedly be corrected in due course. Fortunately, very few such limitations exist, and I consider it an outstanding programming language despite the inevitable presence of scattered imperfections. In practice, I have not found them to be significant enough to cause much concern beyond ensuring that the appropriate Ada 9X revision request is filed; certainly the power that Ada 83 provides is more than enough to keep me busy until the Ada 9X revision process has completed. Certainly software components can be written in other languages; I explicitly structured the definition of this newsgroup's scope in a language-independent manner. Due to the diversity of languages which support reuseability to varying extents (Ada, C++, Eiffel, Smalltalk, and Modula-N, to name a few), specific examples will undoubtedly continue to be written in whatever the author's favorite language (and latest version number, in the case of the "moving targets") happens to be. Bill Wolfe, wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu