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: 103376,fee8802cc3d8334d X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 10a146,fee8802cc3d8334d X-Google-Attributes: gid10a146,public From: mgk25@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn) Subject: Re: Ada and Java. different behaviour. casting long to int problem. Date: 1999/06/17 Message-ID: <7kbbk8$hej$2@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 490743791 References: <7jt2c0$vrb@drn.newsguy.com> <7k57vb$1ipf@drn.newsguy.com> <3766650F.705125B7@pwfl.com> <7k64t7$igo$1@its.hooked.net> <7k689a$ci2@drn.newsguy.com> <3766C842.E1EAB60A@pwfl.com> <3766D1CC.D712895E@itools.symantec.com> <7k8nn5$qcb$1@its.hooked.net> <3767E8A2.EF1A0570@itools.symantec.com> <7k8tv3$3gm@drn.newsguy.com> <37680F83.4426B424@itools.symantec.com> Organization: U of Cambridge Computer Lab, UK Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.java.programmer Date: 1999-06-17T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: D'Arcy Smith writes: |> I'm sure Ada has some silly things as well... I don't know what |> they are since I've never used it. Actually, they are in my opinion pretty rare now. Ada83 was a clean design from scratch, which was very neat but also had quite a few important bits missing (most notable object inheritance) and had a few rather strange limitations. These however were thoroughly fixed when Ada was completely revised in 1995 from ground up, building on over a decade of experience with the first Ada language. The new second Ada language is a real beauty now IMHO and we finally have also free and low-cost high-quality development environments such as the GNU Ada95 compiler available for it. Definitely worth having a look at, especially if Java got you interested in new modern languages, but did not fully live up to your expectations. I consider Ada95 and Java to be the by far most interesting production programming languages around in 1999 (as opposed to experimental academic languages). They do target different application areas however. While Java was designed for maximum portability and GUI-oriented application software that is not extremely time critical, Ada95 is more a broad systems-programming language that is well suited for both portable application programming as well as low-level bit fiddling, real-time signals processing, high performance computing, and embedded applications with strict safety and resource requirements, which were so far more the domain of C. |> Ada software has _never_ failed? Good Lord, of course not. You can screw up in Ada just as much as you can screw up in any language. The nice thing about Ada is just that the language requires compilers to immediately spot many dubious situations for which you would have to buy very expensive and still less reliable tools to detect them in other languages. An experienced Ada programmer can use Ada's powerful subtype system to proof various properties of code for which in other langauges you would need very expensive dataflow analysis and verification tools. This has made Ada95 or Ada subsets such as SPARK the languages of choice in safety critical applications, such as military systems and avionics, but also more recently in quite some financial applications. Ada just supports you well if you want to write very carefully engineered and highly maintainable code. It certainly does not force you to do so. No language could. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: