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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 08:33:00 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: Re: Why are Ada compilers difficult to write ?
From: "Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>
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Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:53305
Date: 2018-06-25T08:33:00-07:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

On Tuesday, June 19, 2018 at 4:33:38 PM UTC-5, Vincent wrote:
> Dear Ada programers,
>=20
> I have often heard that Ada compilers where expensive because they are ve=
ry difficult to write, compared to
> Pascal or C ones. So my question is : what in the Ada language poses prob=
lem 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 c=
hange; 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 progr=
amming languages:  modern C++ and modern Fortran especially.  Even deeper a=
nalytics could compare the open-source repositories to their corresponding =
language-standard documents to measure difficulty of implementing certain f=
eatures.

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

Benevolent-dictators-for-life languages likely have far less sprawl over th=
e 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 a=
n example of this category.)
versus
2) conquer-new-dominions languages that convulse every decade or so to rein=
vent themselves to do something entirely out-of-scope for their earlier era=
s/convulsions.  (Larry Wall's Perl6 seems to be an example of this category=
.)