From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: backlog4.nntp.dca3.giganews.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 19:15:38 -0500 Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 20:15:38 -0400 From: Peter Chapin User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.4.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Augusta: An open source Ada 2012 compiler (someday?) References: <1f0a85a6-ea4d-4d30-8537-0ce9063f992a@googlegroups.com> <330b7d3b-4d12-4482-9ed2-2c82a32a6334@googlegroups.com> In-Reply-To: <330b7d3b-4d12-4482-9ed2-2c82a32a6334@googlegroups.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-4RajgJ0K8djpn+VGnNz3D4GMY9ZPlu8OIVO9RiGWVNNKRUhLqihpP8VUBISdUyIss8lA4njqSXuxyik!A6A1OphvaSChSrz/JHkzHk7ZGeVIAlnN8JVESqpDtSbAtBBY8Vb0W8bI7oYELXY= X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 3297 Xref: number.nntp.dca.giganews.com comp.lang.ada:185401 Date: 2014-03-28T20:15:38-04:00 List-Id: On 2014-03-28 15:20, Dan'l Miller wrote: > I would submit that Ada 202X needs to have at least a third (quite independent) mission if not a fourth mission as well Ada has always been strong in the area of reliability. One obvious(?) direction for Ada 202X would be the incorporation of some, most, or even all of SPARK 2014. I'm not sure how that would fit into AdaCore's business plan but it would certainly be movement forward in a direction that Ada already tries to strongly support. I've heard it said that "ordinary" programmers (whoever they are, exactly) won't use formal verification techniques in their day-to-day programming because such techniques are too difficult to use. It seems like that is changing. Perhaps Ada 202X should lead the way. > 4) Be the least-repulsive compile-time language interpreter/source-code-generator. It sounds like you are talking about staged programming here. I agree that's an interesting area and it even has potential application in embedded systems where a first stage program can generate a specialized and more efficient second stage program that runs on resource constrained hardware. Such a feature for Ada would probably require a way to represent Ada code abstractly so the compiler can manipulate it. Using Scala as an example (because I'm familiar with it)... in Scala you can write methods that manipulate the abstract syntax tree of Scala code. These methods can be executed by the compiler to generate code that is subsequently compiled. Ada has a standard that provides, at some level, an abstract view of Ada code, namely ASIS. Perhaps Ada 202X should consider merging ASIS and Ada in some way to provide a compile time "macro" facility for Ada. It sounds scary hard, though. :) Peter