Re: Why is Ada considered "too specialized" for scientific use

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Mon, 5 Apr 2010 02:09:53 -0700 (PDT), mockturtle wrote:

> Back to the main topic, maybe the only defect of Ada in number
> crunching is the lack
> of some extensive numerical library (but it does not seem to me that
> C, C++ or Java are especially good on this...)

There is a problem specific to Ada. A quality Ada library should deal with
all real types. (Other languages do not have this problem because they are
too primitive.) Technically this results in a bunch of generic packages
instantiated with some actual real type. Apart from being quite boring for
a user this approach has numerical problem. How would you specify and
provide the accuracy for all possible precisions, implicitly defined by the
formal parameter T? Say, the function f(X) should yield the result accurate
within T'Small or, maybe, within [f(X)'Pred, f(X)'Succ] etc. The accuracy
should depend on the precision. You also would certainly need some type
larger than T'Base in order to carry out intermediate calculations. How
would you get such a type in a generic unit?

Ada is an excellent language for number crunching by C's or FORTRAN's
standards. But this is not good enough by the standard of its own.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de