Re: Suitability of Ada as a general-purpose language

[Lucretia <laguest9000@googlemail.com>]

On Monday, July 30, 2012 12:43:46 PM UTC+1, Dufr wrote:

> I have a dilemma: whether to learn Ada or Delphi/Object Pascal (I have a only Pascal background, and I wish to stick with Pascal-like languages). My target would be to write day-to-day (business, educational, etc), relatively simple desktop applications.

I have and always will maintain that with Pascal you are limited as to how far you can go, standard Pascal doesn't have a lot, so you have to rely on different dialects. Whereas with Ada the language will grow as you do.

Also, even though you cannot really judge a language on the size of it's hello world program and how that size compares to other languages, I thought I'd do a test on 32-bit debian:

with ada.text_io; use ada.text_io;

procedure hello is
begin
   put_line ("hello world");
end hello;

$ /usr/bin/gnatmake -O2 hello.adb
$ ls -l hello
-rwxr-xr-x 1 laguest laguest 16563 Aug  2 00:39 hello
$ strip hello
$ ls -l hello
-rwxr-xr-x 1 laguest laguest 9128 Aug  2 00:39 hello

and then:

$ /usr/bin/gnatmake -O2 hello.adb -cargs -fdata-sections -ffunction-sections -largs -Wl,--gc-sections
$ ls -l hello
-rwxr-xr-x 1 laguest laguest 12842 Aug  2 00:43 hello
$ strip hello
$ ls -l hello
-rwxr-xr-x 1 laguest laguest 8584 Aug  2 00:43 hello

Should give you an idea.

Luke.