[OT] Ada gems

[Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 15 October 2014 at 07:31:45 UTC, eles wrote:
> On Tuesday, 14 October 2014 at 19:49:08 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> Am 14.10.2014 um 17:30 schrieb eles:
>>> On Tuesday, 14 October 2014 at 14:56:53 UTC, eles wrote:
>>>> On Tuesday, 14 October 2014 at 13:52:24 UTC, eles wrote:
>
>
>> consistency between 3rd party libraries. Java has spoiled me
>
> While I agree with all this, I think the reason for Java's 
> developing smoothness is not portability as such, but the 
> unitarity of it.
>
> This is exactly how Bjarne puts it: "Java is not portable over 
> platforms, Java is *a platform*."
>
> Which is quite true, might it be not interesting for some 
> applications. In a way is just like one would brag about 
> Windows apps portability on the grounds that all operating 
> systems support Virtualbox...


This is common to any language that offers a rich runtime that 
abstracts away over OS specific issues, while allowing you to 
jump into the OS when required to do so.

C and C++ fail at this, because C's notion of runtime is called 
UNIX and C++ followed along, to cater to the same crowd.

That standard runtime never managed into the language standard 
and instead became a standard of its own, POSIX.

With the caveat that not every OS out there implements POSIX 
(there are others besides Windows that don't), and those that do, 
don't have 100% the same version.

This is exactly the reason why C++ standardization group is now 
trying to get the same form of plaftorm abstractions into the 
standard, that other languages enjoy.

--
Paulo