Re: BDD package in Ada.

[Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>]

"Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> writes:
> [Side note to another thread. That of course goes for GC as
> well. There is lots of junkware that doesn't need to be engineered
> well; that's why dynamic languages have such a following. But that's
> not Ada's target market.]

I'd say Ada's target market has shrunk in the last few decades, to the
realtime systems and embedded control sectors.  The remaining sector of
big server-side non-realtime systems (a buddy of mine used to work on
those) has been mostly ceded to Java, which is garbage collected.  GC's
main benefits are when the program is complicated enough that manual
memory management increases development effort significantly and makes
bugs more likely.  It's less of an issue in simpler programs, especially
those that don't need dynamic memory.

> Whatever BDD is, it can't be very important since I've never heard of
> it until today. :-) I'm pretty sure I would have run across something
> that's actually fundamental in 30 years. YMMV.

Knuth's remark was there are few fundamental data structures that
haven't been around for longer than 30 years, and BDD's are among the
exceptions.