Re: Ada95 Strengths/Weaknesses.

[dvdeug@x8b4e53cd. (David Starner)]

In article <37EED7B8.245C0054@yukyonline.co.yuky>, the middleman wrote:
>I've been learning Ada95 for a year now. And although I don't have much
>experience of other languages I'd certainly say it was my favourite. 
>In discussions with friends the abilities of Ada95 have cropped up. I
>was wondering if anyone could possibly point out the weaknesses and the
>strengths that Ada95 has when compared to other languages such as C so
>that I can finally set the record straight.

Needless to say, it's very arguable. Here's my comparison vs. C & C++.

Advantages vs. C++
* Better modularity support 
* Not locked into class=type pardigm
* Built in tasking support
* Strong typing for real
* Large choice and fine control over types. (C & C++ offer at best a clumsy
mechanism to chose one of the standard types.)
* The libraries were written with module, exception and template support in 
mind (as opposed to C++ where many libraries were written before standard
implementations of those were common, or for compilers that don't support 
them.)
* Almost all Ada compilers are standard compliant (whereas few C++ compilers are
totally standard compliant, and many lack major features (namespaces, 
templates). (Note that most C compilers _are_ ISO C compliant, one of the few 
advantages of C over C++).
* Elegance. Ada is designed by a small team with a strong leader, and was
updated from 83 to 95 by another small team with a strong leader. OTOH, C & C++
were grown languages, with gangly and arbitrary cruft everywhere, with C++ 
especially being designed by commitee.

Additional Advantages vs. C
* Any real modularity support
* Object orientation, and the other aminaties of a modern language (exceptions,
templates, etc)
* Some saftey net against bugs (C compilers by default will let extremely 
questionable & machine depended code by.)

Disadvatages vs. C++
* Type safety makes it harder for some stuff to get done - i.e. it's impossible
to make a type look exactly like a number in Ada, but trivial in C++.
* C++ includes several somewhat experimental features (template specilization,
multiple inheritance) that Ada designers considered too experimental or 
specialized to add.

Disadvantages vs. C & C++
* Large base of installed libraries. If you can find a Ada library that does
what you need to do (not unlikely, but not as likely as for C or C++ - and it's
probably a wrapper around a C library), it probably won't come precompiled and
set up for your system, and it probably won't be installed on your user's 
system.
* C compilers have a standardized interface. OTOH, you can distinuigsh Ada
compilers by the required file names, and the interface is more variant. 
* C & C++ compilers will usually produce smaller and faster code, albeit 
usually less than an order of magnitude.

David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org