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: a07f3367d7,6609c40f81b32989 X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news4.google.com!feeder.news-service.com!xlned.com!feeder3.xlned.com!news.astraweb.com!border2.a.newsrouter.astraweb.com!news.netcologne.de!ramfeed1.netcologne.de!newsfeed.arcor.de!newsspool1.arcor-online.net!news.arcor.de.POSTED!not-for-mail Date: Wed, 07 Apr 2010 11:08:50 +0200 From: Georg Bauhaus User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.24 (Macintosh/20100228) MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Why is Ada considered "too specialized" for scientific use References: <4bb9c72c$0$6990$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net> <4bbb3f22$0$7660$9b4e6d93@newsspool1.arcor-online.net> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <4bbc4ba3$0$7666$9b4e6d93@newsspool1.arcor-online.net> Organization: Arcor NNTP-Posting-Date: 07 Apr 2010 11:08:51 CEST NNTP-Posting-Host: 7ef37030.newsspool1.arcor-online.net X-Trace: DXC=j>HlN:8;5JkPXlQ;h]GTMdic==]BZ:afn4Fo<]lROoRa<`=YMgDjhgbSP;f\ePnKalnc\616M64>jLh>_cHTX3jmIZ]>R0dS2Hn X-Complaints-To: usenet-abuse@arcor.de Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:9909 Date: 2010-04-07T11:08:51+02:00 List-Id: BrianG schrieb: > Georg Bauhaus wrote: >> Keith Thompson schrieb: >>> Georg Bauhaus writes: >>> [...] >>>> C99 (note the year) has complex types, says C hasn't. Well, it >>>> hadn't, as some point in the last century. >>> [...] >>> >>> Unfortunately, the C99 standard has not yet been universally adopted. >>> Very few compilers fully support it. > > And this differs from Ada'05 how? By (1) the number of years between standard publication and support of basic data types and (2) that complex is much older in both Fortran and Ada than it is in C99. But I said that C99 *is* available in 2006, Keith Thompson noted that MS C (not MS C++) is among those implementations that do not *fully* support C99. If only there was a 3rd edition of K&R. I'd hope that (since almost everyone is still relying to C in spite of everything) this new edition could draw attention to at least the new and better type stuff, even when it keeps being as suboptimal as C arrays. > How many compilers support it? Fewer than the total number of compilers (Ada 95 or Ada 2005) available, TTBOMK. > More > importantly (to me), how many non-compiler tools support it? Don't know. Syntax tools have few new things to deal with. X-language tools might even be ahead if they had already supported multiple inheritance of interfaces. Other tools for source code analysis announce to support Ada 2005. Some makers depend on customer demand and either fade or grow. WRT scientific computing, there is one noteworthy development: an Ada subset called SPARK, which I guess is sharing perspective with Fortran subset F in a sense. In part, SPARK brings back some of the spirit of original Ada 83, even when including newer language features into a reasonably small subset. I think that this subset includes stuff very valuable in scientific programming, insofar as the latter will profit from data types and array indexing proven mathematically to be correct, so, for example, leaving out bounds checking is no longer an adventure but becomes a justified consequence.