Rich kids are into COBOL

On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote: Ada-83 lacked function pointers, which made it suck for systems programming. Other than that, I got a lot of use out of it back in the mid-1980s. They fixed that and added a lot of other useful stuff in Ada-95, and even more in Ada-2012. My biggest gripe about it now is that exceptions still aren't a first-class data type; the only data you can attach to an exception is a text string. There was a proposal to fix that back when Ada-95 was in development, but it wasn't accepted. People kludge around that by packing other data into the string. Of course, some people claim that there shouldn't be exception handling at all, and that it's better for things like out-of-bounds array references to have unpredictable results. I've never understood how that could possibly be viewed as a good thing. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the C++ fanatics criticized Ada for being a large, complicated language, designed by committee. (In actuality, Ada was originally designed by a small team.) Over time, C++ copied many of the features of Ada that the C++ fanatics had formerly criticized, and also added many original features, to where C++ is a far more complicated language than Ada. While I won't dispute that there have been many improvements to C++, the fundamental problem is that it's still almost a superset of C, so it's a worse language than C because it has all of C's deficiencies and adds some new ones.