Re: Possible to write compiler to Java VM?

Dirk Craeynest wrote:
> Although Java is a programming language which is syntactically
> similar to C++, it is semantically much closer to Ada 95.


Samuel Tardieu <sam@inf.enst.fr> wrote:
> You may have a look on:
> http://lglwww.epfl.ch/Ada/Resources/Ada_Java.html
> There is a table comparing Java, Ada and C++.


I looked at this web page, and it said that Ada-95 is the language
that Java 'should have been'. With the exception of Ada's header
files, which are a clear advance over C/C++ header files, I think that
this analysis is completely wrong. Ada-95 asked for suggestions on
how to improve Ada-83, and got around 1000, or so. Many of them asked
for turning Ada into a bad approximation to C++, most of which were
thankfully rejected. However, most of those suggestions asking to fix
the underlying problems with Ada-83 were rejected, as well.


The resulting language -- Ada-95 -- has flashes of brilliance (it
would have had more, but some of these flashes were doused by the
usual politics of language standardization), but carries far too much
baggage that it should have jettisoned.


Ada is by far the most frustrating language I have ever dealt with.
Even after many programs and many, many hours with the reference
manual, I would be loathe to attempt to predict that any of my
programs would compile the first time. There are far too many bizarre
rules -- including some which no one can provide any comprehensible
reason for. For many years, there ran in ACM Ada Letters a column
called 'Dear Ada', which basically discussed (with unseemly relish,
IMHO) all of these bizarre interactions of obscure rules. Truly Ada
is a worthy successor to PL/I in this regard.


However, the single most important reason why Java is a _much_ better
language than Ada-95 is the fact that Java does garbage collection and
Ada does not. Twice now, the Ada language people have gone AWOL
(absent without leave -- i.e., deserted) on the GC issue, and for no
technically supportable reasons. Their cowardice under (friendly!)
fire leaves them no moral high ground to claim any kind of superiority
over even Basic or Lotus 123, much less Java.


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