Re: Ada noob here! Is Ada widely used?

["Peter C. Chapin" <pcc482719@gmail.com>]

Duke Normandin wrote:

> To begin with. Looks like I should be learning SPARK? or should I start with
> Ada, _then_ graduate to SPARK?

It depends on what you are trying to do, but Ada is a more general language.
Unless you have a specific need to use SPARK I would suggest starting with
full Ada.

SPARK is a specialized language designed for high integrity and safety
critical programming. It's a very restricted dialect of Ada with additional
annotations (in the form of Ada comments) and a corresponding tool set to
process those annotations. Because the executable part of SPARK is so
restricted, it is not a very convenient language to use for many
applications. While it's great at what it does, it should be applied only
where it is really needed.

One of SPARK's strengths is that you don't have to write the entire program
using it. You can use SPARK for critical "core" algorithms and use full Ada
for the less critical components. Of course deciding what is and is
not "critical" can be a tricky issue.

Peter