Re: ada paper critic

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

Immanuel Scholz wrote:
>>I am searching for a book or a paper which tend to explain the negative
>>aspects on ada.
> 
> 
> Uh, maybe I should add, that my criteria are: stability of the resulting 
> code, rapid coding and speed of the resulting code (in that order). 
> 
> The code should be used in large, distributed applications.
> 
> Any comments speaking against ada? (and, as example in favor of java or 
> c++?)

There was a cross language study done that addresses some of those 
issues. However, it may not work for you since it showed Ada equal or 
superior to every other language in every category except Java, and it 
was equal or superior to Java in most categories (all but "portability" 
and "distributed system support", and it was close behind in those). :-)

There is a copy of it online at 
http://archive.adaic.com/docs/reports/lawlis/content.htm

The paper didn't address "speed", but I can. Speed depends almost 
entirely on your compiler. For *theoretical* speed, Ada should be faster 
than both C (assuming checks are suppressed) and C++. Ada provides the 
compiler with way more information about code and objects with which to 
optimize. Ada will only not be faster than Java if your Java is compiled 
to native code before loading. I'd guess even then Ada will still tend 
to run faster, as its harder to aviod expensive dynamic allocations and 
deallocations in Java.

But if you want real numbers that mean something, get the compilers you 
would use if you were to pick that language, and compare their output 
for the types of code you will be generating. Speed has way more to do 
with the effort your compiler writers put into optimization than with 
the language.