Re: How many different processors do you use?

[mgk25@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn)]

In article <7jjij7$qci$1@nnrp1.deja.com>, muddy_buddy@my-deja.com writes:
|> BTW I know Ada and it is better than C, though the tools aren't too
|> hot.

Oh, you definitely should have a look at Ada again! Things have
improved *dramatically* in the last 2-3 years. The old 1983 Ada
language (which was quite nice but had a few nasty quirks)
was significantly revised in 1995 and has now become Ada95 with
full object-oriented programming support, Unicode support,
better task synchronisation, much cleaner semantics, standardized
interface to C, and much more good stuff. There are now several
low-cost and freeware production-quality Ada95 compilers
and development kits available, and there is a very rapidly growing
Internet community around them. For example, there is an
excellent GNU Ada95 compiler now freely available on all
the usual major platforms. There are also several companies
who are happy to provide you excellent commercial support for
this compiler, including porting it to new embedded
platforms if you should need so. You can easily call the existing
infrastructure of C libraries from Ada directly, and many
popular libraray interfaces have already been ported to Ada
and many others are being worked on.

You *really* should have a look again at Ada95 and the tools
available in 1999 and forget *everything* that you knew about the
popularity of Ada before 1997. Ada95 has in the meantime
become one of the most exciting programming languages on the
market. Ada95 combines the comfort and safety of Java with the
performance and low-level access of C/C++ in a very
interesting way. The syntax of Ada95 should be very intuitive
to anyone who was ever exposed to Pascal, but it is better
designed (no begins after ifs, procedure name optionally
repeated on procedure ends, powerful array and record constant
expressions, functions capable of returning variable length
objects without heap allocation, and many other goodies.)

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/linux-ada/
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ada.html

GNU Ada95 is the new language of choice for performance-hungry
former Jabba programmers.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>