From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,LOTS_OF_MONEY autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,8b6ad99f3a412fab,start X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news1.google.com!news3.google.com!news4.google.com!news.glorb.com!solnet.ch!solnet.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!switch.ch!news.hispeed.ch!linux2.krischik.com!news From: Martin Krischik Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: BYTE Update: =?ISO-8859-15?Q?=A0Ada?= and the Language Renaissance Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 18:24:44 +0200 Organization: Cablecom Newsserver Message-ID: <2834649.jmtpKfET6h@linux1.krischik.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 84-73-3-68.dclient.hispeed.ch Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-15 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit X-Trace: news.hispeed.ch 1127236515 23325 84.73.3.68 (20 Sep 2005 17:15:15 GMT) X-Complaints-To: news@hispeed.ch NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 17:15:15 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: KNode/0.9.2 Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:4959 Date: 2005-09-20T18:24:44+02:00 List-Id: Hi, got this mail which I should forward. A nice positive article actually. Martin ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Martin, I'm no longer subscribing to CLA; but are reading via Google Groups; so my input bounces. The BYTE newsletter article below might be of interest to the Ada community. --s�ren S�ren Henssel-Rasmussen Senior Software Engineer, TP.PCST.GTI.Cph Frederikskaj, Copenhagen ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 1. Ada and the Language Renaissance ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ by Shannon Cochran The growth of the Internet has sparked a renaissance in computer language design. No longer confined to trading ideas at conferences or in academic journals, programming language aficionados can easily find each other in web forums and mailing lists. In this way "little" languages like Ruby and Lisp have accumulated large, active communities of developers that continue to discover new uses for these technologies. Another language that has benefitted from grassroots-level development is Ada. Back in 1995, the Department of Defense spent "probably tens of thousands of dollars" to sponsor the development of Ada 95, estimates Robert Dewar of AdaCore. Now Ada 2005 is coming out--and this time, the work was largely completed by volunteers, with some backing from vendors. You probably haven't thought about Ada for a while, unless you write software for airplanes. But the language is alive and well. Designed in the 1970s to meet Department of Defense requirements for software reliability, Ada is still flourishing in industries that require large scale mission critical programs. And Dewar, of course, thinks that category could be expanded. "There are lot of systems that--somebody may not drop dead if there's a bug, but the consequences could still be enormous," he points out. eBay, he thinks, is a perfect example. As a 25 million dollar company that's absolutely dependent on a single program, "a company like eBay could perfectly well spend the resources to regard that as a critical program that MUST work," he says. "If we put our mind to it and use the right techniques and are willing to spend the resources, this general wisdom that all programs have bugs in them is not acceptable." Ada is considered a more reliable language than Java or C because it features safe, high level memory management as well as a number of compile-time and run-time checks to help avoid bugs like buffer overflows or access to unallocated memory. The Ada 95 revision added object oriented features including dynamic dispatch to the language. Ada 2005 isn't such a drastic overhaul: "It's not a huge earthquake change to the language, but it's got some important things in it," says Dewar. "It's mostly a collection of small smoothing out of things. If you have two packages with types that are dependent on each other...there was no good way to map those. And that problem is being completely solved by the 'limited with' feature, and that will be quite useful in its own right, but most useful for interfacing with C++ and Java." "It's really a unique thing that we've always worried about interfacing with Fortran, with C...C++ wasn't on the scene when we first did the language, but it is now," Dewar comments. "Now Ada and Java are very good friends in terms of language features and interfacing." "It's mostly a matter of relatively small features that have been found to be really useful but annoying in practice," he continues. "There's a notion in Ada of limited types...you're not allowed to assign between objects of these types. It's useful to have something between a [variable] and a constant. But a consequence of that is that you can't initialize these things and particularly you can't initialize it with aggregates. So we've added a feature for limited aggregates...a lot of things are in that category. The calendar feature now has full time zone support which it didn't have before." AdaCore has implemented many of the new enhancements in its own GNAT Pro development environment. And other companies are also working to bring programmers better Ada tools. Aonix has developed an Eclipse plug-in, AonixADT, that brings Ada-project awareness, an Ada-language sensitive editor, Ada-language compile and build capabilities, and a complete Ada debugger interface to the Eclipse platform. Ada 2005 is still officially in development, but Dewar says the technical work is done. "The wheels of standardization grind slowly," he laughs. It will be known as Ada 2005 until next year when it is formally approved by ISO: "and then it will just be Ada." Shannon Cochran Managing Editor scochran@byte.com http://www.byte.com/documents/s=9829/byt1127155273417/0919_cochran.html -- mailto://krischik@users.sourceforge.net Ada programming at: http://ada.krischik.com