Re: Alternatives to C: ObjectPascal, Eiffel, Ada or Modula-3?

[Martin <martin.dowie@btopenworld.com>]

On Jul 21, 1:25 pm, Jon Harrop <j...@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
[snip]
> I am very surprised at the list of languages you arrived at! FreePascal,
> Eiffel and Modula-3 are all essentially dead. Ada is alive but sacrificed
> many hugely-productive forms of abstraction (e.g. first-class functions) in
> order to be optimally suitable for embedded programming. Unless you're
> planning on number crunching on a PIC, which I seriously doubt, Ada would
> be a step in the wrong direction.

You take the 'embedded' tag given to Ada too stongly - it's a general
language with very good support for embedded domains (but also
others).

Runtime performance wise, you can usually get something akin to 'C'-
like speed. Switching off all runtime checks and the difference is
(obviously) even smaller.


> I specialize in scientific computing and I've never heard of anyone using
> any of those languages for it. I doubt any even have efficient
> implementations by modern standards.

That's will come as a huge shock to the guys over at NARVAL [http://
www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/09/090207-fosdem/05-narval.pdf]!!!
:-)

In their own words:

   "It is a distributed data acquisition software system
    that collects and processes data from nuclear and
    particles physics detectors. NARVAL replaces an older
    system based on C, Fortran and proprietary technologies
    with Ada and Debian GNU/Linux and is itself Free
    Software."

Sounds pretty scientific to me...and there are plenty others, e.g.
some Astrophysics work [http://homepage.univie.ac.at/martin.stift/].

AdaCore have 150+ universities signed up for the Academic package
offering tools and support for free (beer & speech) [http://
www.adacore.com/home/academia/] - I doubt very many of them are using
PICs!! ;-)

Cheers
-- Martin