Re: Ada and QNX

[Gautier <gautier.demontmollin@maths.unine.ch>]

Igor Kovalenko:

> Oh, yeah. I bought Ada book some years ago. So many capabilities. Couple
> hundred pages worth of docs printed in small-font. If someone manages to
> a) write a good compiler for that (portable and with runtime-efficient
> code)

Ok, this is done: GNAT.

> and b) somehow teach programmers to understand the whole damn
> thing, then yes it might resurrect. Even then, I have doubts personally.
> Ada is way too high and abstract to be good for system level programming
> (even C++ is too high).

If you can do high and abstract things, it doesn't mean that you can't
do system level programming. Ada provides it, and it is easy.
Maybe you make a confusion with Pascal which doesn't provide it by default.

> And yet it is not as portable and distributable
> as Java to be good for new-age applications. Plus, it smells too much
> like Pascal and that turns me down immediately.

It's a personal taste - nothing to discuss. However C (and decendents)
and Pascal share some archaisms, like the lack of true modularity or
obligation of enclosing every group of more than 1 instruction by
'{','}' (resp. "begin","end" in Pascal).

> Of course, those are
> just my humble personal opinions, I know that others will disagree and I
> don't say that those opinions are absolute right.

> In any case I don't think that pissing into C++ pool will do any good
> for Ada. At best it might just serve you as a good way to kill time
> until a) and b) is done.

Maybe your conditions are more advanced than you think -
and yes, it is a very good way to kill time!

______________________________________________________
Gautier  --  http://members.nbci.com/gdemont/gsoft.htm