From: Neil Hodgson on
Grant Edwards:

> That said, the last time I looked the Ada spec was only something like
> 100 pages long, so a case could be made that it won't take long to
> learn. I don't know how long the C++ language spec is, but I'm
> betting it's closer to 1000 than 100.

The Ada 2012 Language Reference Manual is 860 pages and the Ada 2005
LRM was 790 pages. The annotated versions are even longer
http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/ada12.html

Neil
From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro on
In message <pv76o.2574$Yv.111(a)viwinnwfe01.internal.bigpond.com>, Neil
Hodgson wrote:

> The Ada 2012 Language Reference Manual is 860 pages and the Ada 2005
> LRM was 790 pages. The annotated versions are even longer
> http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/ada12.html

Yeah, unfortunately the language was designed by a committee which was
trying to meet a specification laid down by another committee set up by the
US military.

It seems apt to describe the resulting design as “bulletproof”, but
“elegant” or “concise” ... not so much.
From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro on
In message <pan.2010.08.03.08.35.59.328000(a)nowhere.com>, Nobody wrote:

> One feature which can't readily be implemented in C is the automatic
> clean-up side of the RAII idiom.

Use do-once blocks
<http://www.geek-central.gen.nz/peeves/programming_discipline.html>.

From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro on
In message
<7d95c0d3-718d-4958-9364-263c833f1835(a)i24g2000yqa.googlegroups.com>,
sturlamolden wrote:

> This is unsafe, anyone who writes this in C++ should be flogged:

Only if they're using exceptions. Otherwise, it's fine.
From: Jean-Michel Pichavant on
Carl Banks wrote:
> On Aug 3, 7:07 pm, Paul Rubin <no.em...(a)nospam.invalid> wrote:
>
>> Mozilla is fed up with C++ and seems to be working on its own language,
>> called Rust:
>>
>> http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4009
>>
>
> That looks much better than Go.
>
> It's like all the cool features of Go without the annoying polemics.
> I'm starting to get the feeling one of these languages is going to hit
> a sweet spot and turn C into the next Cobol.
>
>
> Carl Banks
>
I hope you're right, for our children sanity :)

JM