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-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,1116ece181be1aea X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-09-07 12:01:49 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!logbridge.uoregon.edu!arclight.uoregon.edu!wn13feed!wn11feed!worldnet.att.net!204.127.198.203!attbi_feed3!attbi_feed4!attbi.com!sccrnsc01.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3F5B8084.5080705@attbi.com> From: "Robert I. Eachus" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Is the Writing on the Wall for Ada? References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.34.139.183 X-Complaints-To: abuse@comcast.net X-Trace: sccrnsc01 1062961300 24.34.139.183 (Sun, 07 Sep 2003 19:01:40 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2003 19:01:40 GMT Organization: Comcast Online Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2003 19:01:48 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:42240 Date: 2003-09-07T19:01:48+00:00 List-Id: Russ wrote: > I remember Java interfaces only vaguely. Are you telling me that they > do everything that Ada spec files do, and that they do it every bit as > well, with no disadvantages? If so, then I am impressed. But that's a > big "if". I would certainly be interested in other opinions here too. There is a proposal for Ada 200X to add interfaces to Ada. It has been extensively worked, and will almost surely be added. Why? Because intefaces are different from Ada generics and solve other problems. In particular adding interfaces to Ada allows derived types where the type inherits one parent type and adds one or more interfaces. The user must then provide explicitly declared subprograms to match any subprograms in the interfaces that are not provided by the parent type. (In the proposal you can inherit from only interfaces as well. But directly inheriting from only one interface is not that interesting a case.) Back to the original question, I can remember when the challenge to Ada was Smalltalk. Then fifth generation languages like Prolog, then C++, then Java. Now it is C#. Do you see a pattern here? There are programmers who NEED to use whatever the latest new thing is, and won't let considerations like long term maintenance get in their way. (For those who care about using .NET, I see it as orthogonal to using Ada. C#, as far as I am concerned is a restricted subset of C++ that Microsoft provides a .NET enabled compiler for. You can, and for some projects you must, compile some modules outside the C# environment. Could someone provide a .NET enabled compiler for Ada? Sure. Will anyone do so? I don't think so. As long as .NET is seen as a Microsoft Windows only environment, the only advantage to having an Ada .NET compiler is to run the same executables on x86 and IA-64 hardware. But as far as I can see, Itanium2 is succeeding only in the heavy number crunching environment where most users will want as much optimization as possible. (Someday there may be a .NET compiler that is that good. I don't expect to live that long--and I expect to live a long time.) As for x86-64/AMD64, whichever you want to call it, if the operating system supports 64-bit mode, it also supports running mixed 32-bit and 64-bit executables simultaneously and with no extra overhead. Well, technically Microsoft has chosen to support 32-bit executables by providing a (thin) interface to expand 32-bit OS calls to 64-bit addresses on call and return, while Linux provides both "native" 32-bit and 64-bit OS interfaces. However, we are talking a few "extra" instructions per call in WoW-64 to allow the (faster) 64-bit implementation of the OS to be used. It is not clear yet which approach is better, but the difference is in the 1% of execution time range. And both are faster on average than running on a 32-bit OS. So I see C# and .NET as a solution to a problem that will never occur. (Migrating Windows users to IA-64.) -- Robert I. Eachus "As far as I'm concerned, war always means failure." -- Jacques Chirac, President of France "As far as France is concerned, you're right." -- Rush Limbaugh