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From: ucaa2385@alpha1.csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de (Peter Hermann)
Subject: Re: Does Ada95 beat FORTRAN?!?
Date: 1996/04/26
Message-ID: <4lqjko$1vno@info4.rus.uni-stuttgart.de>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 151566505
references: <00001a73+00002ce8@msn.com>
organization: Comp.Center (RUS), U of Stuttgart, FRG
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-04-26T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Kenneth Mays (KMays@msn.com) wrote:
: Hello,

: I was interested in replacing a lot of old Fortran-77 code with Ada 
: code. Does anyone feel that Ada95 is
: better than FORTRAN? Should we replace this old programming language 
: with a better one? Should we
: RETRAIN the thinking processes of our MBA students that FORTRAN (that 
: great formula translator of 1977) should
: be maintained but not used for future development?

: From what we have have seen of Ada95, does it measure up?

: Ken (kmays@msn.com)
: USAF

IMHO, Ada is the natural successor of Fortran77 and,
IMHO, Ada95 is the better alternative to Fortran2000.
Having worked more than 15 years with Fortran and experienced
every niche and pitfall in Fortran, I was specially attracted
by Ada, because Ada is just the same step size as the step
from Assembler to Fortran in terms of good engineering abstraction.
With Ada95, we have finally a language which easily copes
with any existing object-oriented language, hands down.
It has parallel processing, distributed processing,
real-time support and so on in the language standard of 1995.
Ada95 is the adequate software engineering language for
the beginning of the next millenium.

I have stopped considering Fortran as an acceptable tool
with the appearing nightmare of Fortran90, a patchy language
looking like a Ford T model wanting to be a modern car based on
repare-patches. F90 constantly tries to do the same like
Ada but will never reach it. F90 looks like an automobile
graveyard with all its historical burdens.

With the superior semantic information, an Ada-compiler
has many more opportunities to optimize code than the
F- and C-languages from 20 years ago.
(see the article "C vs. Ada:Arguing Performance Religion"
 AdaLetters,Nov/Dec'95,page 67)

--
Peter Hermann  Tel:+49-711-685-3611 Fax:3758 ph@csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de
Pfaffenwaldring 27, 70569 Stuttgart Uni Computeranwendungen
Team Ada: "C'mon people let the world begin" (Paul McCartney)