Re: Ada suitablity as a game dev language

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

"Martin Krischik" <martin@krischik.com> wrote in message 
news:4770972.9DtAtPAQWM@linux1.krischik.com...

> ...
> Ada is true multi purpose language and that includes games. Interesting 
> for
> games might be:
>
> * the ability to defined you own float types (speed vs. precision).
> * abritatry sized integer (12 bit integer - no prob).
> * packed or un-packed arrays and records (speed vs. size).
> * true multi dimensional arrays.
> * choice OO or non-OO programming.

The feature of Ada that Martin seems to have egregiously omitted is its 
especial
support for multi-tasking, something that can be of especial importance for 
some
kinds of games programming. Often it's actually quite fun to write a game in 
Ada
where you simply have a task for each automaton (or indeed every entity 
which
has individual behaviour). There is at least one MUD written in Ada for 
precisely
this reason.

DoD (and other NATO) contractors often use Ada to create (most of) the
software for military and commercial flight simulators and related systems. 
This is
often because: they write real flight systems in Ada, so they already have 
Ada
programmers and expertise; much of those flight systems can be directly 
re-used
in the simulators anyway; Ada is great at multi-tasking. If you consider a 
flight
simulator (or battlefield management simulator, etc.) to be a kind of 
grown-up's
big game (and I know the people who 'play' them do!), then you could 
consider
Ada to be a language much used for games, in fact.

>> You don't see Ada mentioned anywhere (that I know of) in game
>> development circles. Is there a specific reason why?
>
> Because they don't know better. It takes a month of two to see how cool
> Ada truly is.

I suspect the answer is more accurately "For all the same reasons that most
programming shops don't use Ada." Of course, ignorance is undoubtedly one
of those reasons, but (as we havce discussed in this news group recently) 
the
main reason seems to be the lack of a big commercial player willing to 
support
and promote the Ada language (or an implementation of it).

-- 
Nick Roberts