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Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2007 16:38:56 +0300
From: Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@nospam.please>
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Newsgroups: comp.software-eng,comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada - buzzword or not? (Was: Ada-Europe 2007 early registration
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Date: 2007-06-04T16:38:56+03:00
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Chris Hills wrote:

> I think Ada is less popular than it was (a statement of numerical fact 
> not a comment on the language itself) other languages are used more 
> often. However Ada still has a very large part of the safety critical 
> market.  Some areas would use nothing else.
> 
> Pascal and Modular 2 are all but defunct.  There are too many companies 
> with a vested interest in Ada to let it go quietly.

Not only companies -- there are many individuals who use it by 
preference (I am one of these) and who maintain its implementations, for 
example the GCC/GNAT compiler on various Linux distros (alas I am not 
one of these).

I would describe Ada as an industrial strength implementation of the 
ideas in Pascal, Modula 2 and CLU, with a strong guiding philosophy but 
enough pragmatics to make implementations practical and efficient. The 
Ada WikiBook http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:Ada is a good 
introduction to the language.

-- 
Niklas Holsti
Tidorum Ltd
niklas holsti tidorum fi
       .      @       .