Replies

...the ‘sales department’ isn’t exactly an unbiased source.
Re: “This white paper was developed by the UNIX Systems Cooperative Promotion Group,”

I’m not saying there hasn’t been work put into Unix; there has been. I’m not saying there hasn’t been work put into C/C++, there has been. The root problem for both, as foundations for building your system on, is that a lot of that work is fixing issues that stem from the original design. (And yes, the language it’s written in DOES have an impact; remember the premise of NewSpeak in 1984, that by making things unexpressable in the language they were making certain modes-of-thought unthinkable.)

Take, for example, threads.
Threads can be mapped directly onto the Task language construct in Ada; in C++ threads are generally done via API/API-Library. (Because there is a task construct in Ada, the Ada compiler ‘knows’ how to manage threads and can optimize them.)
{ See post 12 here: http://www.rhinocerus.net/forum/lang-ada/583736-c-threads-vs-ada-tasks-surprised.html }

Another interesting insight is how C++ views low-level constructs, like arrays. The differences in how you view such a small item can yield BIG results:
http://www.adaic.org/whyada/ada-vs-c/ada-vs-c.html