[gclist] Language behaviour wrt GC

[Charles Fiterman]

>> If you do a search of the Ada repository, you will find that most,
>> if not all, of the 'pretty-printers' for Ada use a C-based parser,
>> so Ada cannot even parse itself!
>
>Oh come on - this is silly (and either obviously true: no _language_
>can parse itself; or obviously untrue: such parsers written in Ada
>exist and are freely available - e.g., just take the GNAT lexer and
>parser).  Either way, it is irrelevant to this list.

Any language that can interpret a turing machine can parse itself,
but do you want to? If I was writing a parser from scratch I would
use Griswold's Icon the new version is OO. But did these people write
the parser from scratch? I bet they started with a parser for some
other language and fixed it for ADA.

Would I want to write an ADA parser or any other parser in ADA? No!
No! 10^10^10 times No! But the customer might insist and I like to eat.
I'd like to write it in version 8 Icon, or Bison. C wouldn't be high
on the list either, it would be lower on the list than Ada which at
least has a garbage collector.


Charles Fiterman	Geodesic Systems
Phone 312-728-7196	4745 N. Ravenswood Suite 111
Fax   312-728-6096	Chicago Il 60015
cef@geodesic.com

A computer language without garbage collection
  is like a city without garbage collection.