Re: += in ada

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net>]

Marin David Condic wrote:
 >                               Ada missed supporting things that
> were seen as "critical" to embedded programming - unsigned integers, 
> and/or/xor on words, etc. (And I'll spare Robert the jab about the lack 
> of sqrt :-)

That's all right, you got the order correct.  I thought adding a full 
word unsigned capability was more important, but I lost that 
fight--then.  Well, I didn't quite.  It was perfectly legitimate for 
compilers to treat System.Address as an unsigned word and provide 
operations and literals for it.  But users weren't happy with something 
  that implementation dependent.

> Add to this some perceptual problems backed up by reality initially, but 
> they took a long time to cure. Various language constructs were viewed 
> as inherently inefficient - backed up by poor quality compilers. Ada was 
> viewed as outrageously expensive and too grandeose for embedded 
> programming - backed up by outrageously expensive compilers and lack of 
> implementations for embedded targets...


> Hence - back on subject - I see no reason to believe that adding trivial 
> syntax changes is going to in any way win over the crowd that hated Ada 
> for a hell of a lot bigger things than lack of a "+=" operator.

Totally agree.  Ada has become what it is--a wonderful SYSTEMS 
programming language, a decent language for embedded programming, and 
THE language to use if you care about safety and security.  (Modulo 
whether or not to use the SPARC subset in some real-time--and 
other--contexts.)

The problems that Ada had when it was immature could have been handled 
better.  Those who were there will remember the fiascos of the two 
government backed compiler developments, ALS (Softech) and I can't even 
remember the name of the other one right now.  Neither should be 
considered successful, and it took the "commercial only" compilers such 
as Verdix, Rational, and DEC Ada to rescue Ada from those mistakes.

Incidently, I now know enough that I would instead of pages of detailed 
comments on the proposals I would have made one comment.  "Develop the 
compiler, then award the contract for the APSE.  Otherwise you will be 
doomed to failure."  As it is/was, no viable APSE was ever developed 
back then, although some decent development systems have shown up since.

At MITRE in the 1980s we had a standard of comparison for all the 
proposed APSEs.  We compared them to Verdix Ada, SunOS, emacs, and 
decent support for e-mail.  We never added NFS (network file system) to 
that list becuase no proposed APSE ever measured up--and the actual 
implementations were always worse.

-- 
                                           Robert I. Eachus

"Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the 
goal of Art. It remains to work these concepts into a practical, 
down-to-earth context, and for this there is nothing more practical or 
down-to-earth than what I have been talking about all along...the repair 
of an old motorcycle."  -- from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle 
Maintenance by Robert Pirsig