Ada communicating with other programs

[Siegfried Gonzi <siegfried.gonzi@kfunigraz.ac.at>]

Actually I am learning a little bit Ada 95, therefore a few questions:

a) Is it hard for Ada to communicate with other programs? I often have
to deal with big array computations. Currently, I am using Clean (a
functional language with a very matured compiler and as fast a C++) but
it is not possible (whether on Unix, Macintosh or Windows) to really
communicate with other programs. What I love on Clean is its strict-type
behaviour (therefore I would have no problems with the Ada type system).
But I always have to save my computations in a file and post-process it
with Matlab or Yorick,...

Are there any guys who are using Ada in companion with a visualization
tool? Concrete: Calculating an array and passing it immediately to a
visualization program for plotting.

aa) Is it hard in Ada to do "semi command line programming". In Clean I
do not have really a command-line (as with Matlab or IDL or Scilab;but I
cannot program in these languages because I cannot live without types).
Are there any guys who prefer Ada for this kind of tasks (normally
attributed to Matlab or IDL)?


b) How easy is it in Ada to read in a file of the following structure:

Day,Time,Val1,Val2
01:23:2001,12:23:34,2.3445,233.34
02:03:2001,13:45:00,2,344,222

In Clean, I wrote a program to read in the values (after extracting from
the string) and stored it in an array, and by the way the day and time
has been converted to fractional days of the year.

The Clean program consits of nearly 100 lines of code. I ask here "how
easy can it be in Ada", because I have been really depressed and asked
myself why I have to waste my time with such things and is there a
clearer way extracting the values.

c) Is there an aha experience when one is confronted in Ada with "not
having the goody called garbage-collection". In Clean I am accustomed to
garbage-collection and pointer-free programming.


d) Often visualization tools support calling foreign functions, but
often only  C or Fortran. But will it be possible to also call a
compiled Ada function from this tools (lets say Scilab) or must  the
vendor of these tools explicitely support Ada?


Siegfried Gonzi.