Re: Learning Ada (newbie)

[dvdeug@x8b4e53cd.dhcp.okstate.edu (David Starner)]

On Wed, 4 Apr 2001 15:25:27 +0200, Ayende Rahien <Dont@spam.me> wrote:
>2. Can you recommend a good IDE for Ada? Preferably for Windows.

Emacs for Windows is an IDE for Ada; it's a bit generalized and
bears little resemblance to the Visual C++ IDE, but it's the tool 
of choice of quite a few programmers.

>3. I read in Jargon File that "hackers find Ada's exception handling &
>inter-process communication particularly hilarious." among other stuff. Why
>is that? 

No one's quite sure. Ada's exception handling bears close resemblance 
to the exception handling of many other languages. Ada 83 may be bigger 
than most other languages of the early 80's, but Ada 83/95 is significantly 
smaller than many languages of the 90's - especially C++.

>What are the advantages & disadvantages of Ada compare to C or C++
>and other languages?

Ada is a whole lot more anal about stuff than C or C++, tending to
move errors from run-time to compile-time. Ada often allows you to
work at a higher level than C. (For example, if you want to work
with a substring, you create one (string (1 .. 3)) and pass it
around. There's no need to go messing with string functions and
finding a static buffer or allocating memory.) Ada can be compiled
to a JVM and interoperate with Java. There's very few Ada compilers 
out there that don't implement the whole language, unlike C++.

Most of the disadvantages are not inherant in the language. Ada
doesn't have the support of C, C++ and Visual Basic. Most libraries
for those languages will work, but it will take some work finding a
recent binding or writing your own. 

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
"I don't care if Bill personally has my name and reads my email and 
laughs at me. In fact, I'd be rather honored." - Joseph_Greg