Re: should I be interested in ada?

[robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com]

In article <7akvap$j5t$3@plug.news.pipex.net>,
  "Nick Roberts" <Nick.Roberts@dial.pipex.com> wrote:
> 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.

I have seen no such example, perhaps my newsreader
(dejanews) lost a post. Nor do I think a reasonable
equivalence is possible (you might want to dig up the
ancient and extended thread on implementing for all in
Ada 95).

> If anyone would care to provide an example of a Fortran
> parallel loop

You know Fortran, make your own example!

> [...]
> |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.

All these are dubious claims in the extreme. All available
data indicates that number of lines of code is an important
indicator, and most certainly the debugging effort is much
greater. I am beginning to wonder how much Fortran you have
actually written (i.e. Fortran code using these kind of
slicing semantics). I actually have not written much, but
I have written lots of Algol-68 code using multiple
dimensional array slicing, for linear algebra applications,
and that kind of code is FAR harder to write in Ada, no
doubt about it.

Of course it would be surprising if we could not find some
examples where it is easier to write X in Y than in Z, for
some X and all Y and Z. For example, the silly thread
recently where X was "sorting using only standard language
features", Y was C++ and Z was Ada 95.

This does not mean that Y is necesarily better than Z, even
for programs that involve X, since there may be other
advantages that outweigh the very specific comparison
point.

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