Re: If not Ada, what else...

[David Botton <david@botton.com>]

> Well, the big win of Ada 2012 is SPARK integration, it seems to me.

Adding Pre/Post, etc. is more like Eiffel integration. Not that big a deal to be officially part of the language itself, but not unwelcome.

If you manage your types well in Ada you need far less of these "extras". More emphasis on Ada's real strength in typing is a smarter investment in the language and leaving proving tools outside the language. I certainly hope things don't go further than they already have in this direction.

From a marketing perspective  AdaCore made a mistake reversing the original direction of SPARK to distance itself as far from Ada as possible. The Ada name is burnt in the US and it was good marketing to create distance. They should have just changed their name to CodeCore and marketed their multiple language products all focused on "correct code".

> There's nothing like that for D.

Actually there is and has been there for some time. Pre/Post, invariants, etc. and with a syntax that is far cleaner.

>  I looked at the Wikipedia page about D

Better to look at dlang.org and if you are comfortable directly with the language specs  and as per another post to look at Phobos (the runt time) which puts D way ahead in most areas. (Of course D is also truly open source no runtime license games)

The feature of Ada (and is a big one) that places Ada ahead of D (and other languages) is the type system of Ada that has been in place since Ada 83. Since then Ada has suffered from feature creep issues due to reluctance to throw away the dross and accept more incompatibilities between versions.

> and didn't see much to recommend it over Ada, except garbage collection

The funny thing is that I don't consider that a big deal at all. I enjoy Ada in particular because of the ways I get around needing to have a GC because of it (interestingly enough those features like nested procedures are part of D too).

> which puts it in a different class of languages.

That is one of the nice things about D, that it doesn't put it in a different class of languages given the ability to avoid use of the GC if you choose and when you choose.

BTW, Ada has always considered a D like implementation of a GC, just that only 3 implementations of Ada, that I know of, ever did it. Does that put Ada in a different category now too?

In fact D and Ada are _exactly_ in the same space, designed to be systems languages and general purpose. (Actually there are a number of device drivers written in D at least 2 OSes, etc.) Ada unlike SPARK is not a niche language, just being forced in to one.

My point in bringing up D, a language that is almost there, is that the extreme niche thinking that is towing Ada around has harmed Ada acceptance and is creating road blocks for Ada's long term future.

If D tweaked its type system a bit not sure Ada would make much sense for anyone other than long term old projects.

>  For desktop and server
> applications I like lightweight concurrency, garbage collection,
> functional idioms, and maybe even dynamic types, but for low level
> systems code Ada is still looking good to me.

I am not advocating D, nor asking the D people to consider improving their type system, I'm advocating community efforts to improve Ada's general purpose use and avoid it further sinking in to extreme niche use that will make Ada in to SPARK or another niche language of little use outside that niche.

David Botton