Re: Community Input for the Maintenance and Revision of the Ada Programming Language

[faryumg@gmail.com]

For me, Ada is a wonderful language for my engineering calculations, from small, quick one-offs to large simulations of many thousands of lines. (The thick Ada bindings and extensions to the plotter PLplot are incredibly useful here.) Some people would instead use Octave or Matlab but I find these languages inadequate for a number of reasons.

I have built my own tools including operator overloads for real, imaginary, complex, and integer scalars, mating with overloads for vector and matrix types. I have overloads for many scalar math functions already included in Ada along with a number of other tools useful to the engineer and scientist. Consequently, I can type a line of mathematical code that is more readable than Matlab code, thanks in part to strong typing.

Oddly missing from Ada, and commented about on this list before, is why brackets [ ] aren't used for array indexing. This is highly suggestive of the mathematical notation for vector and matrices and would improve readability and remove the confusion of what is an array and what is a function.

Also missing is multidimensional array slicing. This really needs to be added to remove errors of users' attempts to do something similar using ad hoc methods.

Ada 2005 added standardized real-valued vectors and matrices and a little bit of linear algebra. Awesome. What is really needed is native bindings to full high-level libraries of linear algebra: BLAS, LAPACK, possibly via Atlas. These are super stable and have been used for decades in Fortran and C. Bindings exist but are too hard to grok and not built-in. Also, high-level math and special function libraries are needed such as the GNU Scientific Library or even the Octave libraries. Some will question whether these are appropriate to include in the language proper and that is a valid conversation. But it is things like this that will help get Ada away from the "embedded" stereotype.