Re: Why are Ada compilers difficult to write ?

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Tuesday, June 19, 2018 at 4:33:38 PM UTC-5, Vincent wrote:
> Dear Ada programers,
> 
> I have often heard that Ada compilers where expensive because they are very difficult to write, compared to
> Pascal or C ones. So my question is : what in the Ada language poses problem to a compiler ? What are the
> challenges ? Where can I find documentation about that ?

The commit history alone of GNAT, Clang, and Flang is where empirical data (e.g., size of source code; intertwinedness of source code; burstiness of change; number of key mastermind contributors; defect rate) can be harvested for an academic paper that explores this topic, to see whether Ada is any more complicated or any larger at all than other modern quite-evolved programming languages:  modern C++ and modern Fortran especially.  Even deeper analytics could compare the open-source repositories to their corresponding language-standard documents to measure difficulty of implementing certain features.

I suspect that the answer is that all programming languages become the same enormous size and same complexity given enough decades of ISO standardization or design-by-committee analogue thereof.  What differs is what each committee/community expended their energies & diligence & tenacity on.

Benevolent-dictators-for-life languages likely have far less sprawl over the decades, but likely fall into 2 size/complexity categories:

1) kiss-principle (keep it simple, stupid) languages that evolve relatively little over the period of decades (Yukihiro Matsumoto's Ruby seems to be an example of this category.)
versus
2) conquer-new-dominions languages that convulse every decade or so to reinvent themselves to do something entirely out-of-scope for their earlier eras/convulsions.  (Larry Wall's Perl6 seems to be an example of this category.)