Re: Weakness of Ada is expensive / security / etc. ? Anything else?

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Friday, July 17, 2015 at 4:19:30 AM UTC-6, Trish Cayetano wrote:
> Hi, here is what I have noted as strengths and weaknesses of Ada. Let me know for any corrections and if you have anything to add... Thank you!
> 
> Strength and weaknesses of the language 
> Strength
> -	Semantics - well defined even in error situations

And the "Bounded Error" option in the spec. (Which is essentially a step between "well-defined and specified behavior" and "undefined behavior".)

> -	Strong typing - can be used to reduce the scope (and cost) of analysis

This should not be underestimated; you can protect (e.g.) a database against bad input with strong typing; you can enforce validity-checks and formatting with it too.

> Weaknesses
> -	Ada complete language is too complex. True or False? If true, how?

False; while it's a 'big' language it's not difficult and full of gotchas -- if you use it regularly (and 'idiomatically') for a couple of years you're not going to be surprised by much... whereas with C++ you constantly see experts with decade-plus experience being surprised.

> -	Ada requires expensive compilers for large systems 

Semi-false -- This depends on what you're doing. FSF-GNAT is free, but comes with GPL; AdaCore-GNAT is also free but comes with a DIFFERENT GPL. Others like RR-Software or IBM's (they bought Rational) will have a different license.

> -	Ada lacks that web presence greatly. comp.lang.ada is the only location on the internet with an active Ada community.

Semi-true -- others have given places where the Ada programmers hang out; but these places usually have an excellent signal to noise ratio. (There could stand to be more tutorials and such.)

> -	How is security a weakness? (Strength can be a weakness too?)

It's not. Security is something you have to consider while designing the program; and having all the security in the world available means absolutely nothing if you don't use it. -- Ada *does* make a lot of security-related things easier with its strong-typing and, funnily enough, with its timing mechanisms. (You can [theoretically] eliminate the timing side-channel attack by marking the "time+maximal operation duration", do the operation, execute a "delay until X" [where X is the calculated time] and now the timing side-channel doesn't exist because that operation executes with constant time.)