Re: Practicalities of Ada for app development

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Tuesday, June 12, 2012 2:12:53 PM UTC-7, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> Adam Beneschan wrote:
> > 
> > there are existing libraries to do such things in Ada.  I think
> > Vadim Godunko has a regular expression matcher
> 
> Any high-level language can be expanded with libraries.  This
> capability doesn't offer a means to claim that the language itself is
> good for all problems.
> 
> One project might use Bob's String Parsing Machine (tm), while another
> project becomes dependant on Vadim's Regex Swiss Army Knife (tm).  So
> you have the wheel reinvented in multiple styles, and developers who
> cannot count on homogeneous interfaces being available as they move
> from one project to the next.  OTOH, you can count on developers to
> know the language.  IOW, what would otherwise be common knowledge
> becomes tribal knowledge - knowledge that's lost with turnover.  And
> libs that are not held to the same standards and verification as the
> compiler.

Maybe this should be a challenge to the Ada community to come up with some common package specification (or set of packages) that would be sufficient to meet those needs, so that users wouldn't feel a need to switch to Perl to get the same kind of expressive power.  Offhand, I don't think it would need to become part of the official language standard (the letters I, S, and O are not a magical incantation that automatically makes software more trustworthy).  We've had working groups in the past that have developed standard packages that weren't part of the language (although some of them became part of later versions of the language, like Ada.Numerics).  What does anyone else think?  Does this seem worthwhile?  I have to admit, I've sometimes been frustrated when I need to work with text, although not enough to get me to use Perl for more than smallish programs, so off the top of my head this seems like it might be useful.  

                          -- Adam