From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: f849b,857262ad7d0ad537 X-Google-Attributes: gidf849b,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,c2f4cdd9ccfb8ede X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 1014db,1904a679c27288b6,start X-Google-Attributes: gid1014db,public X-Google-Thread: 1025b4,1904a679c27288b6,start X-Google-Attributes: gid1025b4,public From: mgk25@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn) Subject: Re: How many different processors do you use? Date: 1999/06/09 Message-ID: <7jl9n3$n9j$1@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 487417323 References: <7j1qng$4fp$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <37576ded.26569745@news.mpx.com.au> <7j8ac0$eah$1@uranium.btinternet.com> <7jh07e$tek$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <7jhp34$6f1$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <7jjij7$qci$1@nnrp1.deja.com> Organization: U of Cambridge Computer Lab, UK Newsgroups: comp.arch.embedded,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,gnu.misc.discuss Date: 1999-06-09T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <7jjij7$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: