Re: Advantages of Ada (also AdaOS)

["Nick Roberts" <nick.roberts@acm.org>]

"Andrew Carroll" <andrew@carroll-tech.net> wrote in message
news:mailman.155.1088165232.391.comp.lang.ada@ada-france.org...

> ...
> Okay Marin and Nick, I want to learn more.  Where can I
> find the statistical and practical proof?  I'm not trying to snub
> your comments, I just want to be able to provide the proof
> when I talk to my co-workers about Ada.  Thanks!

Ada provides a fairly comprehensive set of features for concurrent
programming built into the language, which are all carefully defined by the
standard, and so permit concurrent Ada programs to be highly portable.
Concurrent programming in most other languages (certainly C and C++) can
only be achieved using calls to a library.

There are dozens of different kinds of typical mistake that an Ada compiler
can detect that one of these languages cannot, and dozens more that will be
caught at run time in an Ada program that will simply cause misbehaviour
(typically intermittent and hard to detect) in one of the other languages.

Typically a library used for concurrent programming is operating-system
specific, thus rendering programs that use it totally non-portable to any
other environment.

Of those languages which do have special support for concurrency, I think it
would probably be fair to say that most (maybe all) do not have facilities
that are as comprehensive nor as well designed as Ada. I'd certainly
describe Java like that.

I can produce illustrations of these points, if required. I'm not sure that
I can produce statistical proof as such.

On a related note, I'd like to mention that the AdaOS project is still
extant, and I'll be communicating about it soon.

-- 
Nick Roberts