Re: NOACE- End of the road for Ada?

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

adaworks@sbcglobal.net wrote:
> 
> 
> It would be really cool to have a standard interface between Ada and
> Matlab.
> 
Probably, but it would be even MORE cool if there was an entire Ada
equivalent of Matlab, et alia. The whole bundle of stuff produced by The 
Mathworks is pretty cool for the modeling world, but I think it has 
problems when people try to bring it into production. It is very 
tempting to say "Well, now that you've defined the control in the model 
world and conducted a bunch of tests on it, why don't we just compile it 
and take that code into the production box..." But the model world likes 
to play fast and loose with all the things that might cause problems in 
a production world. (For example, everything tends to be just a "real" 
number - not much type checking going on. Or not much support for 
low-level representations of data that might matter when the zeros and 
ones actually connect to the hardware. Or any number of other complaints.)

So people like to just build these models then take the code into 
production, but might it not be BETTER if the modeling tool had 
capabilities aimed at the production world? Might it not be BETTER if a 
modeling tool took into consideration the needs of and proven techniques 
of embedded software development? So if someone designed such a modeling 
tool and incorporated Ada-isms into it and had it generating Ada code, 
and it provided BETTER capabilities to the guy designing models, might 
that not create an interesting marketplace for Ada?

The same kind of thinking could be applied to other problem domains. Its 
not enough just to have a compiler and a few general tools for 
development. For the language to thrive in an environment, the tools for 
that domain must also support the language well. (or perhaps the other 
way around?)

MDC

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Marin David Condic
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