Re: What about Ada?

[Ted Dennison <dennison@escmail.orl.mmc.com>]

H Marx wrote:
> 
> Hi there,
> I signed onto this list to find out what Ada is about. But so far saw
> only Psacal vs. C vs. Assembler...?

People like to post provocative questions here that are crossposted to
naturally antagonistic groups. The replies tend to dominate the traffic
here (out of proportion to most people's interest in them). Welcome to
USENET.

> I use Borland Pascal 7.0 and assembler a lot. But it has limitations.
> -What would be the reasons for me to use Ada?

The best reason over Borland Pascal is support of multi-threaded 
algorithms (tasking).

> -How portable is it?
If you stick to the defined language, quite portable. If you need to use
platform-specific libraries, then obviously that code won't be portable.
(Only very simple I/O is defined in the Ada standard.)

> -Are there "Integerated Developers enviroments" available?
Sure. Ada vendors sort of pioneered this approach, although few have ever
been quite as snazzy as Visual C++.

> -Does it use DOS Seg:Ofs memory scheme's, PMode, 32-bit flat?
It depends on the compiler.

> -Can you use it in Windows? For windows?
There are windows compilers, yes.

> -How good is it's database support?
If you want to make your own simple databases, you can use standard Ada
with no problem. Otherwise, you will have to use some sort of interface
library (just like with any other language).

> -Does it allow function and operator overloading?
Yup. 

> -How optimised/fast is the code it produces?
It depends on the compiler. Some are quite mature (=> good).

> Someone remarked on the list that Ada does not allow Macro's, but does
> give you the option of using OOP or Procedural. Just like macro's can be
> abused, so can OOP, and I would like to have liked the option of using
> macros. (Pascal does not allow it either:-(

Ada programs can (and do) allow the use of generic units (much like C++
templates) to achieve the same effect in a much less error-prone manner.
If you still want macros, there's nothing stopping you from using your
own pre-processor.

-- 
T.E.D.          
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