Re: is Ada dying?

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On Wed, 17 Oct 2001, John McCabe wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Oct 2001 15:05:15 GMT, Israel Raj T
> <israelrt@optushome.com.au> wrote:
> >On 15 Oct 2001 03:24:09 -0700, Robert*@ <Robert_member@newsguy.com>
> >wrote:
> >>In article <3bca9c74.1660187@news.demon.co.uk>, john.mccabe@emrad.com.nospam
> >>>Of course it is - Pascal was designed as a teaching language, Java
> >>>wasn't designed.
> >
> >Most of the better comp.sci courses use a functional ( haskell  or ml
> >at Cambridge and Oxford ) or semifunctional ( scheme at mit) as a
> >first language for their undergraduates.
> >
> > However, Stanford ( perhaps the best practical comp.sci dept in the
> >world )

Perhaps it isn't "the best practical comp.sci dept in the world".

> > seem to use a mixture of c++ , java and c.

When I was there the programming languages course was focused on ML. It is
true that C/C++ were used heavily in computer graphics and OS courses, and
Fortran was still widely used in scientific computing and engineering.

> I thought both ml and scheme were AI type languages.

What is an "AI type language"? Is Ada a "guided missile type language"?
Errr, no pejorative intended in the latter, I'm a big fan of advanced
weapons.

Scheme is a dialect of Lisp developed at MIT. It's original claim to fame
is that it uses lexical scoping instead of that horrible dynamic scoping
from the original Lisps (which still survives in elisp BTW). Nowadays,
there are a ton of different variants of Scheme since the core language is
too small to be widely useful, but Scheme is used quite widely outside of
the AI field.

ML was originally the meta-language of a theorem prover developed by Robin
Milner (so it can stand for either Meta-Language or Milner's Language :)
and it's claim to fame is it's static type system. In contrast to Ada,
ML style static typing doesn't require much explicit annotation (ideally
none!) and the typing algorithm just figures out the type of a program
fragment; so you get many of the perceived benefits of both static and
dynamic typing. Later, ML got a very nice module system which should make
Ada refugees happy.

Nowadays there are two main dialects of ML: SML and OCaml. They are used
widely outside of AI too, but the focus appears to be on "compiler like"
programs. I use and like OCaml quite a bit.

-- Brian