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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII X-Google-Thread: 103376,be23df8e7e275d73 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-08-07 16:02:45 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!newsfeed.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newshub2.home.com!news.home.com!news2.rdc2.tx.home.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3B707688.340B8A70@home.com> From: Larry Elmore X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.7 i586) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Proving Correctness (was Java Portability) References: <9kea9a$lsc$1@nh.pace.co.uk> <9keduf$qvc$1@a1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de> <9kelv1$riq$1@a1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Date: Tue, 07 Aug 2001 23:02:44 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 65.10.25.74 X-Complaints-To: abuse@home.net X-Trace: news2.rdc2.tx.home.com 997225364 65.10.25.74 (Tue, 07 Aug 2001 16:02:44 PDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 07 Aug 2001 16:02:44 PDT Organization: Excite@Home - The Leader in Broadband http://home.com/faster Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:11547 Date: 2001-08-07T23:02:44+00:00 List-Id: nicolas wrote: > > "Leif Roar Moldskred" a �crit dans le message > news: y%Ob7.737$ep5.11352@news1.oke.nextra.no... > > Well, in that case I've officially lost your point. No, Ada doesn't > > have a lot of standard, cross-compiler, cross-platform libraries. So? > > Ada doesn't have a lot of standard, cross-compiler, cross-platform > libraries, this is in my opinion, one of the main reason why so few people > use Ada. > That's the subject of the dicussion. How many standard, cross-compiler, cross-platform libraries exist for _any_ language? I'd be willing to bet more would be in Fortran than any other language. > > Hmmm, I'll admit I'm an Ada-neophyte, but I never thought the Ada > > community hyped these aspects of Ada, anymore than other > > object-oriented programming languages. > > I've seen those aspects extremely highly hyped for about 12 years ... > And if you forget them, I think Ada loose the most part of its reason to > exist. It's been no more "hyped" than any other OO language. If this is your argument, why is C++ still around? There's still not a single compiler, AFAIK, that implements the C++ standard completely and correctly. So I rather doubt there's scads of "standard" libraries out there for it that are truly cross-compiler, cross-platform. > > I can see that they might jump to that conclusion, but I'll disagree > > that they have a reason to. The lack of a wide selection of XML > > libraries is more a question of demand than of the language. > > There is few demand for 2 basic reasons > - There are very few Ada users > - Ada users are often very interested in making their own version of already > existing things, forgetting that goes against all their claims to justify > Ada use. I think your second point is bogus. Reinventing the wheel goes on everywhere and in every language (and often because the developer feels he/she can do a better job than whoever came before). > > And as for this particular XML library, it seems to me to be your > > typical one-man open source project. To request that a one-man > > endeavor should be written and tested for several different > > compiler/platform combinations is, in my opinion, unreasonable. > > A better test on the reuse / portability of Ada, would be to consider > > what additional work needs to be done to make this one-compiler, > > one-platform library generally portable. > > From my experience, well written Ada code portability is almost > straightforward as long as you care about not using specific compiler > packages or pragmas. No kidding. That's more than you can say about C/C++!!! There were lots of C and C++ programmers long before there were anything _like_ standard, cross-compiler, cross-platform libraries. How long was C around before the most _basic_ C library could make that claim? Larry