Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[john@peppermind.com]

On Thursday, July 4, 2013 3:31:40 PM UTC+1, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

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> >> tasking is more complicated than in other languages because
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> >>> it is properly defined and not just wrapped around OS threads.
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> >> I second all this, but the last argument is odd. Something well-defined is
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> >> more > complicated than something not so well-defined?
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> > Isn't that often the case? I didn't want to imply that there is anything
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> > wrong with Ada tasking. To paraphrase Einstein: "Everything should be made
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> > as simple as possible, but no simpler."
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> This discussion reads strange to me. How can anybody seriously claim that
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> beginthread, fork, CreateMutex, WaitForSingleObject, compartments etc stuff
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> is simpler than Ada's tasking. Is it a joke?
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No, but we might have different perspectives. I've just learned Ada. In comparison with FreePascal you're right about parallelism constructs, though. I've checked on their web pages and it looks fairly complicated. I had other languages in mind, where it's often easy to write parallel code but hard to make it correct.  For example in Racket, (thread <thunk>) will execute the parameterless function <thunk> concurrently. Or, take OpenMP on top of C++ where you can use pragmas like #pragma omp parallel for automatically parallelizing loops.

For me as an Ada newbie learning tasks and protected objects was easy - but understanding Rendezvous was hard. Having Barnes's book and McCormick et. al. helped, but generally I'd say the Ada references focus on completeness and correctness rather than being beginner-friendly.