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: 10261c,cfbb90c56a313e70 X-Google-Attributes: gid10261c,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,cfbb90c56a313e70 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Marco van de Voort Subject: Re: From extended Pascals to Ada 95 guide Date: 2000/08/28 Message-ID: <39AAC6DB.CC9BCB66@stack.nl>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 663613903 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <8o3s2a$9ph$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <8o4bfq$v0h$1@slb7.atl.mindspring.net> <39A655BE.18E89020@maths.unine.ch> <39A668AB.26F88375@maths.unine.ch> <39A6ABD9.634308AA@earthlink.net> <39AA2B85.F9A917E8@maths.unine.ch> <39AA6526.A33A4330@acm.org> <39AA7F69.E195BA42@maths.unine.ch> X-Accept-Language: en Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Organization: Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands Mime-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.pascal.misc Date: 2000-08-28T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: About the Matrix type: The subtype system, to me, looks like a cross between and attempt to implement multidimensional openarrays, and GPC pascal's schemata types. If I were you, I wouldn't be too sad that it doesn't > Marco: > > I do. But to program apps, not to create academical perfect programs. > > I also think portability issues are often severely overrated. > > It depends on your needs. Definitely. But portability demands always need extra time. Except if you allow the applications limits to be set by the portability requirements. > When you have to maintain a large commercial > program that must run on NT for some customers, on Linux for others > it's perfectly feasible in Ada (real case). That is the same processor, and NT is POSIX compliant. If you use some IBCS format, you might even be able to use the same binary :-) (in theory of course). Well, I can only put the FPC compiler itself. 100000 lines, and increasing daily. FreeBSD will be the fifth i386 OS. > Try just to manage accurately > file I/O in a portable way in Pascal, even details like 'what happens when > such file is not there ?'. Not to make the hot-line explode... First: What does ADA in such case? The program always has to react to what happens and doesn't happen in such cases. An non existant file (that should exist) always triggers some special treatment. That treatment can be as simple as halt-program, or reinitialise, but it is a condition set by the programmer, not by the language. Second: What pascal does in this case depends on the runtime library I use, not on pascal. This is a critical difference, since in free compilers with access to the compiler source, you can finally remove/replace nearly all the RTL. TS M2 was pretty much the Borland under the Modula2 compilers. (and even related to BP IIRC) > Another important thing: you should have the choice between compilers, even > when your program already has more than 100'000 lines. E.g. switch from > a compiler firm A (which suddenly closed down, stopped development, > begins to procude a unusable bloatware, has too expensive support or > doesn't provide optimization or a Linux version) to firm B or C. That happened to me. Not with a large codebase, but with a bunch of small utils, non of which rocketscience, that kept a few BBSes running. At a certain point people started using longfilenames, and I was stuck with the TopSpeed RTL. That's why I moved to a free compiler, and for private, or even medium use, I'll never consider a commercial compiler again. Not only because in problem cases you can fix problems yourself, but compilerprojects are relatively large projects, and probably will last for a decade in some form. (iow several generations of developpers) > > >Ada is kind of like > > >"Pascal++" in that the syntax is very much like Pascal's, but it cures > > >certain ills that existed there and then added a *lot* more stuff to > > >make the language much more powerful. > > > Over standard pascal, or over Delphi? > > Anyway, a lot over BP7. Yeah, but I dumped BP7 in 1993 for TopSpeed :-) (Modula-2) I don't know much about ADA. I liked TopSpeed M2, but didn't like ISO-M2, M3 or Oberon. > I would be glad to incorporate some details about Delphi in my comparison... I think we should call it Object Pascal :-) Delphi is more the entire project (including IDE, libraries etc) Check the manuals or specs: - Inprise (Borland) is quite generous with the helpfiles, and they are downloadable from ftp.inprise.com/pub/delphi/techpubs (or something like that) - JEDI, the Delphi open source project, has a documentation project (and tool), it is called Dolphin, and contains some nice texts. - For the FPC implementation: download the reference manual from the FPC site (www.freepascal.org) -- Marco van de Voort (Marcov@stack.nl or marco@freepascal.org)