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-Thread: 103376,b860b4e8d00468ef X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!newshub.sdsu.edu!elnk-nf2-pas!newsfeed.earthlink.net!stamper.news.pas.earthlink.net!stamper.news.atl.earthlink.net!newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net.POSTED!d9c68f36!not-for-mail Message-ID: <4124920C.1070807@noplace.com> From: Marin David Condic User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823 Netscape/7.0 (OEM-HPQ-PRS1C03) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada access vs C/C++ pointers and references References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 11:42:09 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.165.3.133 X-Complaints-To: abuse@earthlink.net X-Trace: newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net 1092915729 209.165.3.133 (Thu, 19 Aug 2004 04:42:09 PDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 04:42:09 PDT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:2847 Date: 2004-08-19T11:42:09+00:00 List-Id: Nick Roberts wrote: > >> Third, if Ada does not provide arithmetic pointers do you know if >> this has played any part in acceptance of Ada for systems >> programming or efficiency critical applications? > > > I don't know (sorry). > Ada 83 missed address arithmetic and modular types and while it is hard to tell what impact that had, I know it did not thrill people who had to do bare-machine type of jobs. However, Ada 95 has this and it doesn't seem to be creating a groundswell of support in the embedded world. Note that C and C++ tend to lack the really great low-level representation capabilities of Ada and I frankly don't know how the poor guys who use those languages for embedded systems can get along without them. Nevertheless, they do & Ada has only a small smidgen of the embedded systems market. I suspect that you can't point at any one feature or lack of it (Like the infamous "+=" debate?) and say "This causes Language X to be popular/unpopular" I think it just has more to do with what people know and their resistance to change without some perceived major benefit. People got used to programming with C because it was readily available and interfaced to the OS. Ada comes along and so people start thinking: "Well, its not C and it doesn't even look remotely like C, so let me start dreaming up reasons why its bad so I won't have to learn how to use it..." MDC -- ====================================================================== Marin David Condic I work for: http://www.belcan.com/ My project is: http://www.jsf.mil/NSFrames.htm Send Replies To: m o d c @ a m o g c n i c . r "Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat" -- John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy 1981-1987 ======================================================================