Re: Suggestions to a Newbie

["Marin D. Condic" <mcondic-nospam@acm.org>]

Cagdas Ozgenc wrote:
> 1) A starter's book for a programmer with solid experience in programming
> with many other languages. Basically I do not want a book that teaches what
> recursion is etc. Also it would be better if it directly gets into practical
> applications with OO paradigm, without talking about what OO is.
> 
Bard Crawford just published a book that sounds like it would fit your
needs. Try: http://www.learnada.com/ See also: http://www.adapower.com/
for more book references. My web site has some links to other Ada
related sites as well as some code examples that may be useful to you.

> 2) A compiler for Windows NT, with a dedicated IDE. Free or commercial
> doesn't matter. Free would be better, but if the compiler and the IDE are
> developed by different people, or companies, I really do not want to go
> through the hell of configuring a generic IDE to run externally a compiler,
> and its debugger.
> 
Depends on your needs. Adapower has links to many of the compiler
vendors. Many beginners use the GNAT compiler with the AdaGide IDE. You
can download both at the FTP site. (See Adapower or my links page). 

> Also, can we say that Ada is an allround language, or is it targeted for a
> specific field?
> Are the libraries provided with Ada portable across several platforms, is
> there a Standard library for Ada?
> How would you compare its performance to C++? (without biasing it with your
> love for Ada)
> 
Ada is an excellent general-purpose programming language. It is designed
for high reliability and long-lived systems. Normally, you'd not use it
for things that are quick-and-dirty where (for example) something like a
shell scripting language would be more appropriate. For most other
things it works just fine. Check out the websites mentioned and the
others linked to from there. You'll find many people have written about
what Ada is useful for.

There are a number of libraries defined by the standard for Ada that all
compilers must adhere to for all platforms. There are some which are
optional for when a compiler is being used for a platform on which it
makes no sense. See the Ada Reference Manual (online at Adapower) to
find out what libraries are in the standard. There are also many
non-standard-quasi-standard libraries available from other sources. For
example, the Ada binding to the Win32api is pretty much an agreed upon
standard, but it isn't part of the language standard and won't work on
all platforms (obviously!) There are many libraries available from
numerous sources for specialized needs. Portability may vary with these.
If you surf the net a little or ask around, you can find lots of Ada
source code for a variety of needs.

Performance compared to C++? That depends. What do you mean by
performance? Compiler speed? Runtime speed? Development speed?
Reliability? ..... I'll assume you mean the efficiency of the language
in terms of the code it produces and answer this way: It depends. :-)
There is nothing inherent in Ada that will keep it from performing as
well or better than any other language out there. In some cases, because
of the amount of information available to the compiler, it is possible
to perform optimizations you couldn't do in languages like C++. OTOH,
the *actual* speed of code produced by one compiler versus another can
vary considerably. A good quality C++ compiler will outperform a bad
quality Ada compiler, and likewise, the other way around. Compiler
performance is not a language issue. That said, most of the
implementations I've seen have generated very good code so as to be
indistinguishable from comparable compilers for other languages in most
applications. Until you start trying to compile for embedded/realtime
systems, the difference typically is unimportant. *That* having been
said, I've used Ada in embedded/realtime systems and seen extremely fast
code produced from the language. "Performance" of Ada will not likely be
a problem for you so long as you select the right compiler for the job.

MDC
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Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
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