Re: Script-like jobs in Ada (ideas for HAC)

[Bojan Bozovic <bozovic.bojan@gmail.com>]

On Friday, April 24, 2020 at 9:45:34 PM UTC+2, gautier...@hotmail.com wrote:
> It's a poll - sort of.
> 
> The question is: what kind of jobs do you prefer let a scripting language do and not Ada?
> 
> My guess is that this kind of choice is related to toolsets, libraries and other aspects that are not necessarily related to languages.
> For instance you would perhaps avoid using Ada for a 30-lines program that browses files and collects some information in those files (just an example). Or a little math / stats program? Or a small game?
> But maybe the real reason (even if it is unconscious) you'd avoid Ada is because the compiler you are using is slow, or because it spits objects and executable files each time you change your small program. And you'd be more comfortable with a script that runs immediately without making garbage files.
> 
> A goal of the HAC compiler [1] is precisely to blur the border between a script and an Ada program: from the command line, you write "hax myprog.adb" and it just runs (that's already working). Now I'd be curious of examples of scripts you'd consider writing in Ada with HAC, if it supplied the convenient functions and libraries. It's all work-in-progress currently, and ideas of applications are welcome at this point of the development.
> 
> Thanks for any input!
> --
> [1] http://hacadacompiler.sf.net/  and  https://github.com/zertovitch/hac

Make it embeddable! That's the advantage of scripting language, code/modules in compiled language can do all the heavy lifting, while providing ease of use of a scripting language.
That's normal for web and it's the way PHP, Python and Perl work. That's also normal in game development, where game logic is often written in some scripting language.
Also for some uses it would be useful if it could run compiled pseudocode, in a manner NET does.