Re: Array mappings

[merlin@annwfn.com (Fred McCall)]

In <rgh.788116097@camo> rgh@shell.com Richard G. Hash writes:

>I agree that Fortran friendly arrays would have been nice, along with a
>couple thousand other things. But they just didn't rate more than a blip
>on the map compared to, oh, let's say, working compilers? Ones where you
>didn't have to recompile a quarter million lines once a week because the
>library structure got hosed up with great regularity (recompiling was an
>event which took about 30 hours at the time). Ones where the generated
>code was 9 times slower than equivalent Fortran code. Ones where the 7th
>argument to a routine didn't end up in the weeds. Ones that had actual
>working math libraries that gave the right results.
>
>Let's face it, if you were introduced to Ada in 1986 and were trying
>to convert a bunch of Fortran programmers over - you had an uphill
>struggle. The compilers were not all that great back then (there were
>some exceptions, I'll grant you), and the optimizations were not what
>they are today. Fairly or not, they gave the impression of slow, buggy,
>pain the the derriere ^&@#$^, and were the butt of many a joke. Can you
>not remember back?

All I have to do is remember back to December of last year (a couple of
weeks ago).  The description given above for the state of the practice
in 1986 sounds appropriate for my experiences with current releases of
tools in 1994.

Ada is a lovely language in theory, but if you actually use some of the
features (like generics, array slices, etc.) compilers/toolsets do
wrong/inefficient things.  It's been a long time; the tools should be
*much* better than they are, given how much they cost.

--
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
 in the real world."   -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
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merlin@annwfn.com -- I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.