Optimizing Ada95

Optimizing Ada95

[Kenneth Mays]

Greetings,

1.) For those surfing the web for specialty packages. I noticed that AdaIC
is the best place to look for these products (precision integer packages)
or the software engineering web sites I mentioned in earlier messages.
C/C++ repositories are not a bad place to look, if you don't mind patching
your code.

2.) This brings up another point. Since there is a lot of code written in
C/C++, don't we have a C/C++ to Ada95 translator? I was think I could find
these special tools on the government corporate web sites. I know this
seems silly to some people, but I would like to research the efficiency
and effectiveness of optimization between a C/C++ to Ada95 translator 
and a Ada95 to C/C++ translator (GNAT?). Many researchers test the 
speed between
the same program coded in C++ versus Ada95, so I would like to see if
there are ways to improve Ada95 to C++ speed. Mission Impossible? 

Sidenote: Why reinvent the wheel when you can just patch the code 
(but first make sure you understand what its suppose to do, not 
really how it does it (reusability concept))?

3.) What research is being done to optimize Ada95? Do many developers 
compare Ada95 against BASIC, Pascal, SmallTalk, or other languages? 
Do you
REALLY feel that Ada95 is as fast as something written in Modula or Pascal?
Will it ever become as fast as a program written in C++?? Should our 
research go into transparent interfaces that converts Ada95 into 
highly optimizedmachine or C/C++ code? I think if we do this for 
Ada95, couldn't we do this for BASIC? MicroSoft's QuickBasic 4.5 to 
C++ translator anyone?

There are many Ada success stories. We all know that Ada95 has its 
faults but is a very welcomed language (for most of us). So how many 
companies
are pushing Ada95 debugging tools (CodeView) or optimizing compilers?
Are we also considering comparing various Ada95 compilers on the SAME 
platform to see how they compile and optimize test programs? I don't 
think ACVC 2.0.1 covers this area - this is a marketing issue.

So if we talk about optimization, what will we look for? Would you want a
Ada95 compiler compiling your source code to run like it was written 
in BASIC?!?! Or, would you rather have your Ada95 compiler compiling 
your Ada source code like it was written in pure machine language or 
C (heck, yeah)?!?!? I think we need to talk to some compiler 
programming gurus
and see how far we can make them sweat (smile). Just kidding.

-Ken, USAF
Software Engineer/MIS

"I came, I saw, I kicked some ***"