Re: Ada users

["lanceboyle@qwest.net" <lanceboyle@qwest.net>]

On Apr 2, 4:52 pm, Chetan <chetan.xs...@xspam.sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I was wondering about the type of projects Ada is being used nowadays,
> besides defence related projects.  What do you use it for?
>
> --
> What's news?

I use Ada (GNAT 4.3) for most of my "general purpose" programming. I'm
an engineer (research and R&D) so that means all manner of
calculations, simulations, etc. I use it where many people would use
Octave or Matlab. However, many of my projects are larger than would
be comfortable in those languages (i.e., 50 lines 8^). I have made
function overloads for the arithmetic operators so that writing
algebraic expressions using floats, integers, and complex types is
easy and easy to read. Ada 2005 added official real and complex
vectors and matrices; I have added overloads to also allow "mixed-
mode" arithmetic with those vectors and matrices and floats, integers,
and complex types. Yes, it's a nuisance to have to do this, but it's
not hard and you have to do it only once.

I use several other tools--Igor Pro, Mathematica, Octave,
Supercollider, Max/MSP, ChucK, LiveMath Maker, Pascal (for legacy
stuff), and a bit of sed and regexp, etc.--but Ada is far and away my
first tool. I believe in using the most appropriate tool for any given
job, and mixing as necessary, and Ada is the most appropriate most of
the time.

Jerry

P.S. One thing that makes Ada so useful for my general calculation
needs are the Ada bindings to PLplot (which I wrote). See
http://plplot.sourceforge.net/.