Re: an interested business-oriented programmer

[Gary Scott <Gary.L.Scott@lmtas.lmco.com>]

Hi,
So why doesn't someone put together a "Visual Ada" product integrated
with Visual Studio and mass market it?  They did it for Fortran...

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> It depends on exactly what you are looking for.
> 
> To start with, visit: http://www.adapower.org/ since this will point you at
> a lot of additional resources. I invite you to look over my Ada page at:
> http://www.mcondic.com/ - you may find code and links there that would be
> useful. (In particular, in my "Utilities" code, you'll find lots of
> financial calculations.)
> 
> Is Ada suitable for business software development? Absolutely! In
> particular, Decimal types and Annex F aim to support business software. You
> probably won't find as much suppost in other general purpose languages. From
> a purely technical standpoint, I'd use Ada for serious business software
> development unless I had special conditions that made something else a
> better choice. (specific hardware without an Ada compiler, use of specific
> subsystems, databases, etc, that make some other language more practical...)
> 
> Books: There are a number of books out there. See AdaPower for a
> bibliography. You can at least order some of them if not available in the
> bookstore. (Some are unfortunately out of print.) There are also on-line
> tutorials available so look for those as well.
> 
> General advice: You can usually put together a good software development kit
> for Ada that will give you more or less the same facilities you might find
> in almost any other general purpose language. The down side is that you kind
> of have to assemble various pieces of it on your own. The Gnat public
> distribution (available free of charge - see links on Adapower or my page)
> is a good place to start for a set of very portable development tools. RR
> Software has an Ada compiler and a GUI Builder and API for the Windows
> environment called Claw. Aonix has compilers for a variety of platforms &
> other development tools as well. Lots of choices there, but you need to
> figure out what all your needs are and maybe go digging around for the
> missing pieces. (Ada doesn't come bundled with a large class library like
> Java or MSVC++ - a down side. But you can find collections of stuff all over
> that get you a lot of the same functionality.)
> 
> You'll find that Ada is a lot more portable than other languages and that it
> isn't hard to move code from one processor/OS to another - as long as you
> stuck to what the language defines and don't use processor/OS dependent
> third-party stuff. (GUIs are a prime example - hard to make that portable
> and have all the wonderful features possible within a given OS!) This is an
> advantage to Ada and also a weakness. MSVC++ provides for all intents and
> purposes, its own version of C++. Using the whole of it, you won't build
> portable code - especially as you use the MFC. No portability, but boy can
> you get at all the nooks & crannies of Windows all from a nicely integrated
> development environment. Ada can build programs to run on a PC, but you have
> to assemble the pieces yourself to some extent and you don't get at all the
> corners of the OS quite so easily (sometimes easier - if you have the right
> tools). Personally, I'd rather do the job in Ada for a variety of reasons,
> but I can see why others might opt for what they can leverage out of tools
> more tailored to the specific environment. In other words, I'd recommend
> Ada, but be advised you might need to pull together different pieces from
> different sources rather than get a one-stop-shopping solution.
> 
> MDC
> --
> Marin David Condic
> Senior Software Engineer
> Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
> Enabling the digital revolution
> e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
> Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/
> 
> "Rod Weston" <rod_weston@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:f7ce0059.0106060822.55a13f7@posting.google.com...
> > I am currently surveying the state of programming in the business
> > world, deciding where to get involved with OOP.  In the few days that
> > I have been evaluating Ada, it seems to have the attributes of a
> > language I would like to learn, but I am rather concerned about the
> > lack of popular support for it, especially in the business world.  I
> > went to my local Barnes and Noble bookstore last night and found not a
> > single book on Ada.  I went to my library and found only four books,
> > two of which were written before 1987.  And I haven't seen a single
> > reference to a business (inventory, sales, etc.) program written in
> > Ada.  Could someone offer some encouragement for me?  I don't mind
> > being a pioneer, I just want to have some assurance that my efforts
> > will not be wasted.
> >
> > Thanks for your consideration.
> >
> > Rod Weston