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=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_DATE autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,b19fa62fdce575f9 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1994-12-19 23:42:34 PST Path: nntp.gmd.de!news.rwth-aachen.de!newsserver.rrzn.uni-hannover.de!aix11.hrz.uni-oldenburg.de!uniol!zib-berlin.de!gs.dfn.de!zeus.rbi.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de!terra.wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de!news.th-darmstadt.de!fauern!xlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!timbuk.cray.com!equalizer!network.ucsd.edu!mbk From: mbk@inls1.ucsd.edu (Matt Kennel) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Array mappings Date: 19 Dec 1994 19:10:24 GMT Organization: Institute For Nonlinear Science, UCSD Message-ID: <3d4lr0$aos@network.ucsd.edu> References: <3d2pia$pcu@felix.seas.gwu.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: gibbs.ucsd.edu X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL8] Date: 1994-12-19T19:10:24+00:00 List-Id: Michael Feldman (mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu) wrote: : >Ada 9X requires this support. Whether that requirement is justified : >remains to be seen. That will really show whether Mike is right. If we : >see a huge army of Fortran programmers suddenly saying "great, now that : >I can write my subscripts the "right" way round in Ada 95, I will switch : >to using Ada", then we will know that Mike was rigt, and that Ada vendors : >missed an important opportunity. Well maybe it is a bit too late now since, : Well, given that F90 provides nearly all the language maturity that : an engineer would need, not quite, but given F90 is such an enormous improvement over f77 in many of those particular problem areas that might have motivated Fortran programmers to switch to Ada83, it will be harder now. ; I see it as rather unlikely at this point. : I don;t think the array subscript issue is the only adoption barrier, : but the aggregate of this and other issues (the lack of a quasi-standard : math library, for example) contributed, I'm sure. Actually, I think that : in this as in other domains where Ada has poor penetration, the barriers : were mostly nontechnical. But certainly fixing the obvious technical holes : might have taken some excuses away. It also sends a little bit of the right signal "We care about you." Indeed, I'm personally surprised that Ada83 didn't do this. Given my vague prejudices as being of "Supposed to be used for DOD stuff" (which includes lots of numerical simulation) and "has nearly every feature known to man in 1980" :-+ I would have thought that at least Ada would do it even if nothing else did. : >Note: Many Fortran programmers are moving to C, C doesn't have any help : >for Fortran array ordering, and I never heard of this being an adoption : >barrier. Oh sure it is. It's just that sometimes other benefits are better and you have to make a tradeoff. I've never heard of anybody *liking* the fact that they can't do things as they're used to in fortran, or that C pointers may be aliased. Other reasons to move to C are that common GUI libraries and Unix system library calls are nearly natural in C. : Mike Feldman -- -Matt Kennel mbk@inls1.ucsd.edu -Institute for Nonlinear Science, University of California, San Diego -*** AD: Archive for nonlinear dynamics papers & programs: FTP to -*** lyapunov.ucsd.edu, username "anonymous".