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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,fd3a5ba6349a6060 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: William Clodius Subject: Re: should I be interested in ada? Date: 1999/02/22 Message-ID: <36D1DFCC.167E@lanl.gov>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 447533253 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <7a72e6$g55$1@probity.mcc.ac.uk> <36C93BB4.1429@ecs.soton.ac.uk> <7afc1o$3mi$2@plug.news.pipex.net> <7afttr$7v3$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <7aganu$qsc$1@plug.news.pipex.net> <36CC3AEA.59E2@lanl.gov> <7ai502$6an$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36CD8DBA.237C@lanl.gov> <7akvao$j5t$2@plug.news.pipex.net> <7aldu1$4q$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <7aslfp$gpq$1@plug.news.pipex.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Organization: Los Alamos National Lab Mime-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1999-02-22T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Nick Roberts wrote: > > robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com wrote in message > <7aldu1$4q$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>... > > |First, the > |Ada code is far uglier and less safe than the Fortran code, > > Hearsay. This is a totally subjective opinion (either way I suppose), isn't > it? All other things being equal, the more code it takes to do something the more error prone it is. Although all other things are rarely equal, the FORALL code is very easy for humans and compilers to parse and understand. Once the programmer understands it he finds it usefull and uses it a lot so that it does not remain an obsure idiom to those familar with the language. There is therefore no obvious other quality to the Ada code that counterballance the negative effects of a much longer length. > > |I really cannot imagine anyone thinking otherwise. > > To be honest, I would be interested in seeing a greater variety of opinions > (please!). Robert does not seem to have procduced any counter-argument to my > point about the advantages of abstraction. I don't think anyone will argue with you about the virtues of abstraction, but every language has a finite definition, and that finite definition intrinsically limits how well an abstraction can match the semantics of a specific context. In particular FORALL and WHERE are abstractions that convey directly the concept of parallelism and array element relationships that can only be indirectly inferred from your equivalent. They are abstractions that in practice appear to be most useful in the context of (high performance) numerics, so they have not gained wide currency, but application specific abstractions are a very usefull aspect of domain specific languages, and Fortran continues to emphasize numerics and high performance in its definition. > -- William B. Clodius Phone: (505)-665-9370 Los Alamos Nat. Lab., NIS-2 FAX: (505)-667-3815 PO Box 1663, MS-C323 Group office: (505)-667-5776 Los Alamos, NM 87545 Email: wclodius@lanl.gov