Re: should I be interested in ada?

["Nick Roberts" <Nick.Roberts@dial.pipex.com>]

robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com wrote in message
<7ajl7i$e8v$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>...
|In article <7aingo$orv$2@plug.news.pipex.net>,
|  "Nick Roberts" <Nick.Roberts@dial.pipex.com> wrote:
|> Perhaps you would care to produce some 'powerful
|examples' yourself?
|>
|> Bear in mind, my original claim was that "there is
|> nothing that can be done in Fortran that cannot be done
|> in Ada." I didn't say "that cannot be done just as
|> neatly" and I didn't mean it. I just meant "that cannot
|> also be done _reasonably easily_ in Ada."
|
|Obvious example; a parallel loop with no implied ordering
|in the sequence. We once extensively discussed the
|following addition to Ada:
|
|   for all J in ... loop ...
|
|with that meaning. Without an extension, there is simply
|no "reasonably easy" way to program this in Ada.


In fact, there is always a very easy way to program this in Ada. I have
given an example, in another post, of an Ada equivalent of a Fortran FORALL
statement. If anyone would care to provide an example of a Fortran parallel
loop, I will demonstrate how easy it is to reprogram it in Ada.

[...]
|Doesn't Fortran also have slicing of multi-dimensional
|arrays, this is also obviously very painful in Ada.


Yes, and yes it is fairly painful, but far from impractical. I've given an
example in another post, where one Fortran line becomes seven Ada lines. I
reckon this is an extreme example, in practical terms. And, even so, in
terms of programmer productivity and debugging effort, I would contend that
the effective cost of these different forms would be the same: it's not
going to take a programmer a significantly extra amount of time just to type
in the extra text; the bulkier form is not going to be likely to give rise
to more bugs, or to be more difficult to debug if it does.

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Nick Roberts
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