A comparison of generic template support: ada, C++, C#, and javaTM

Authors:
Benjamin M. Brosgol
Affiliations:
AdaCore, New York NY
Venue:
Ada-Europe'10 Proceedings of the 15th Ada-Europe international conference on Reliable Software Technologies
Year:
2010

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Abstract

Generics (also known as templates) have become a standard feature of modern programming languages, offering parameterization by data types and possibly other entities. Generics support efficient type-safe container data structures, general-purpose algorithms, and other reusable components. However, the approaches in different languages vary widely in syntax, semantics, and usage. This paper summarizes the design of generics in Ada, C++, C#, and Java and compares them with respect to expressiveness, implementation model / run-time efficiency, and interaction with object-oriented programming and other features.