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From: nabbasi@pacbell.net
Subject: Re: should I be interested in ada?
Date: 1999/02/18
Message-ID: <7ahsjs$kte@drn.newsguy.com>#1/1
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References: <7a72e6$g55$1@probity.mcc.ac.uk> <36C93BB4.1429@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
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Organization: Newsguy News Service [http://www.newsguy.com]
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1999-02-18T00:00:00+00:00
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In article <36CC6AC0.25DBE56D@erols.com>, Dan says...
>
>Hello,
>
>Nick Roberts wrote:
>> 
 
>> 
>> So, hopefully, my original point stands.
>

>The only point I would take issue with is the efficiency issue.

valid point, but is 'few' more instructions really that important
these days, when 1000 MHZ PC's and workstations are around the corner?

offcourse this is all hand waving on my part, without concrete
numbers and specific tests one would not know.

>
>Also, Fortran's intrinsic library has (usually hand) optimized
>matrix multiply, dot product, locate maximum element, locate
>minimum element, etc.
>

is there a reason why the same could not be done in Ada also?
I assume Fortran has a bigger library of such intrinsic functions,
(last time I programmed in F77 was 15 years ago), but I dont see 
why Ada could not have the same functions implemented.

There is this package for math functions:

ASSET_A_402 Generic Elementary Math Functions:

"These generic Ada packages provide a set of mathematical 
functions that conform to the SIGAda Numerics Working Group's
proposed standard, which is a proposed secondary ISO standard. 

The package as specified consists of 29 functions, which can 
be classified into three families: exponential, trigonometric, and
hyperbolic. 

The exponential family consists of 5 functions: Sqrt(x), Exp(x),
 X**Y, Log(X) and Log(x,Base). 

The trigonometric family consists of 16 functions: the four 
usual trig functions Sin(x), Cos(x), Tan(x), and Cot(x) and the four
inverses Arcsin(x), Arccos(x), Arctan(y,x), and Arccot(x,y) 
constitute 8 of the 16. These 8 functions are approximations to the
corresponding mathematical functions, with 2pi being the period. 
The proposed ISO standard also requires 8 other functions that allow
the user to specify a period (e.g., 360.0). The calling sequences for 
the other 8 are Sin(x,cycle), Cos(x, cycle), ..., and Arccot(y,x,cycle). 

Finally, the hyperbolic family consists of 8 functions: the commonly used
Sinh(x), Cosh(x), Tanh(x), and Coth(x) and the
corresponding inverses Arcsinh(x), Arccosh(x), Arctanh(x), and Arccoth(x). "

to download, see:

 http://direct.asset.com/wsrd/product.asp?pf_id=ASSET%5FA%5F402

Nasser