Re: should I be interested in ada?

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

William Clodius wrote in message <36D43C64.15FB@lanl.gov>...
[...]

| X(J) = X


I'd say this shows the high-level power of Fortran 90 at its best.  I mean,
this is neat!  This is almost APL (and I mean that as a compliment - APL can
be a really, really neat language).

| FORALL (I=1:N, J=1:M) A(I,J) = I + J


The Ada equivalent would be:

   for i in 1..N loop
      for j in 1..M loop
         A(i,j) := i+j;
      end loop;
   end loop;

You might say "that's five times bigger!"  But I would strongly contend that
it would be highly naive to think that because one piece of code is five
lines and another is one line, it must therefore be five times more complex
(in terms of diffculty to read, difficulty to debug, etc.).

| WHERE(A(1:N) == 0.) A(1:N) = B(1:N)

The Ada would be:

   for i in 1..N loop
      if A(i) = 0.0 then A(i) := B(i); end if;
   end loop;

Less neat, certainly. But I think similar comments apply as to the previous
example.

|William B. Clodius Phone: (505)-665-9370
|Los Alamos Nat. Lab., NIS-2     FAX: (505)-667-3815
|PO Box 1663, MS-C323    Group office: (505)-667-5776
|Los Alamos, NM 87545            Email: wclodius@lanl.gov

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Nick Roberts
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