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- Path: oitnews.harvard.edu!cmcl2!schonberg!dewar
- From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++
- Subject: Re: C/C++ knocks the ....
- Date: 17 Feb 1996 13:17:44 -0500
- Organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
- Message-ID: <dewar.824580811@schonberg>
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- A general point on complexity vs simplicity.
-
- During the Ada 95 design, we were constantly arguing along this spectrum.
-
- About half way through I realized that a lot of the trouble was that
- complex means a lot of different things, and we stopped to categorize them:
-
- complex to learn
- complex to use
- complex to implement
- complex to formally define
- complex to understand rigorously
-
- these are potentially different. For example, the exceptions facility
- may be complex in several, perhaps all, the above rrespects, but one
- more entry:
-
- complex to understand programs using the facility
-
- may result in regarding exceptions as a simplifying factor, since if
- exceptions are really needed, it is simpler to understand a program
- in Ada that uses exceptions rather than in another language where
- the facility must be painfully faked.
-
- Or take any of the many features that are easy to understand and define,
- but hard to implement (dynamic own variables in Algol-60 are a nice
- example -- variable length fields in a record are a nice example in Ada).
-
- So when people talk about complexity, it is quite helpful if they narrow
- down a bit what they mean.
-
-