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,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,54889de51045a215 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-10-21 07:46:19 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news2.google.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!wn14feed!worldnet.att.net!204.127.198.203!attbi_feed3!attbi.com!rwcrnsc53.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3F954670.8080004@comcast.net> 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: += in ada References: <1066224357.499523@master.nyc.kbcfp.com> <1066231159.711433@master.nyc.kbcfp.com> <1066311805.222491@master.nyc.kbcfp.com> <3F8F3077.60402@comcast.net> <3F900F35.50203@comcast.net> <3F952A59.5090001@noplace.com> 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: rwcrnsc53 1066747578 24.34.139.183 (Tue, 21 Oct 2003 14:46:18 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 14:46:18 GMT Organization: Comcast Online Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 14:46:19 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:1293 Date: 2003-10-21T14:46:19+00:00 List-Id: 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