Re: Papers saying Ada as an overly complex language and hard to implement

[eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)]

In article <34EB6579.C791152D@cs.utexas.edu> Yongxiang Gao <gyx@cs.utexas.edu> writes (quoting Calvin):

 >      Could you do another literature search for me?  I'm interested in
 > papers that explain why Ada is an overly complex language, why it's
 > a hard language to write a compiler for, and other problems with Ada.

     Please remember in doing this search, to put the papers you get
in context.  For example, many of the criticisms of Ada 80 were
directed at the IO model, which was completely redesigned for Ada 83.
Yes, Ada 83 Text_IO took a lot of flack about the support for
page numbering.  But since IO was now completely an external package,
rather than a built-in feature, no one had to use Text_IO if they
didn't want to, and in fact, many compiler vendors provided--and still
provide--a "Simple_IO" package which is faster and more suited for CRTs.

     Another criticism of Ada 83 was that it would be impossible to
build a good compiler that ran on a machine with 128 K of memory.  The
third compiler validated did just that--although it was tough.
However, for many years the R&R Compiler has fit nicely on a 640 K
MS-DOS machine.  The whole compiler, not just the programs created.

     And finally, there has been an incredibly long running criticism
of the Ada (83) tasking model as overly complex.  It may be, but it is
also a COMPLETE tasking model that can serve as the tasking model
underlying and exported by an operating system--and it a couple of
cases it does.  There are also many embedded real-time executives
which support the Ada tasking model directly.  In fact, much of the
work on hard deadline scheduling has been done around Ada 83, and Ada
95 now includes support for additional scheduling models and allows
adding others.  Certainly a feature which maybe one Ada programmer in
a hundred needs--but having it in the language means that most of the
programmers on a large project never need to know it is there.
--

					Robert I. Eachus

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