Re: next "big" language?? (disagree)

[ucaa2385@alpha1.csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de (Peter Hermann)]

The Amorphous Mass (robinson@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu) wrote:
[snip]
:   I think you're assuming that everyone is deveoping a huge, complex 
: project with 100 teams of 100 programmers each working on mainframes with 
: 350MHz Alphas and 256MB of RAM (OK, I'm exaggerating a little :-).  Those 

not at all.
My home PC is a 486 which I recently upgraded from 8 to 24MB RAM.
The reason was an application which steadily grew complex.
(btw, a simple DOS application, but very useful ;-) ).
The 8MB were fine for GNAT (the GNU Ada95 translator) as long as 
I did not use excessive generic abstraction. However, with the 
need of dynamically requested space during compilation of
a demanding logical architecture, the 8MB did not satisfy
the compilation process. The size is NOT in terms of lines of code.
A few keystrokes for a coding-abstraction generates temp space
for the compilation process.
The result is an executable of a few KILObytes,
where the compiler has done all optimization before.  ;-)

: of us lone programmers who put speed and space at a premium are willing 
: to go hunting for stray pointers as a necessary cost of using a small, 
: fast language.

I better leave this hunting to a compiler.
(btw: the pointer concept in Ada does not allow dangling pointers)

:Besides, Ada is not the only big, safe, feature-laden, industrial-strength 

Ada is not big, safe, feature-laden, but industrial-strength and
shaped with that minimum of features to compete as a general purpose
object-oriented language (with concurrency and real-time capability).

: language out there.  So obviously there are people who would agree 
: wholeheartedly with your argument, but who would then disagree that Ada 
: would be the best language to use for "professional" programming.  The 
: nature of that disagreement is, of course, subjective.

James, you will certainly agree that a state-of-the-art PC
sold today will have a minimum of 16MB/800MB/80MHz, don't you?
This is much larger than needed for the free GNAT3.04 which
simply requires 12MB(ram)/20MB(disk) space.
The idea is: Developing on a commonly used PC or workstation
and cross-compiling to a target e.g. an embedded system,
small computer, or even an 8051 field processor.
The developer has the flavor of object-orientedness,
genericity, etc. and the executable will easily fit into a 
heart pacer, if needed. 
To come to an end:
One of the great potentials of the future are reusable software elements.

--
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)