Re: Numerical Computation and Ada95

[Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>]

"N&J" <nikogian@hotmail.com> writes:

> I have posed the question whether Ada95 is suitable for numerical
> programming at the newsgroup of numerical analysis.  I asked if
> Ada95 is better that Fortran90/95 and C++ for writing programs for
> numerical computation and the reply was that the Ada language
> specification requires extensive run-time checks which slows down
> the programs.

You can selectively turns checks off in Ada using language feature,
the information you have just shows that the people you've talked to
know nothing about Ada.

> I thought it would be better to ask your opinion too.

Wise :).

> I have noticed that there are too few numerical programs in Ada95
> for numerical computation is the above fact the real cause for this?

There is some numerical code available in Ada on the web, plus
bindings to traditional computing kernels. Most big Ada software is
for military or industry which is not widely known and distributed (as
opposed to Fortran in the scientific community).

> Finally would you suggest someone to use Ada95 for numerical code?

At work we have 250 KSLOC of Ada 95 doing financial number crunching
on a variety of platforms (SGI O2000 64 procs, Linux clusters of
various size, Solaris, NT), and Ada definitely does the job fine.

We turned checks off on one tight loop to beat third party code in
performance, otherwise we prefer the safety of checks against a 10-20%
speed improvement.

-- 
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>