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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,dab7d920e4340f12 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 1014db,dab7d920e4340f12 X-Google-Attributes: gid1014db,public From: jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony) Subject: Re: C is 'better' than Ada because... Date: 1996/08/01 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 171453476 sender: news@organon.com (news) references: <31daad10.57288085@netline-fddi.jpl.nasa.gov> organization: Organon Motives, Inc. newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c Date: 1996-08-01T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article djohnson@tartarus.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson) writes: > but if no one knows it...). Here's some important things to do to > give your new fictitious language a boost: > > Make it free. Make it portable. This lets it get on multiple > systems, so that you don't get users trapped (if it only ran on UNIX, > you'd never get Windows users, and vice versa). Being free, users can > modify it and make suggestions, and port it for you for free. Forget Fortunately, this time around Ada (Ada95) takes this sort of approach. GNAT (Gnu Ada) was/is the pump primer and an excellent compiler in its own right. It has been ported all over the place. > Have it generate C code as the backend. Don't bother with native code > generation until it's caught on. This makes your language much more Better yet: take advantage of existing code generators and generate the IL they expect. This is what GNAT did (it uses the GCC backend - it does NOT generate C code) by targetting a code generator that is itself targetted to many platforms. The Intermetrics AdaMagic frontend flips this around and is designed to accomodate many different flavors of backends. Generating C code is clumsy, cannot take advantage of as much optimization potential, and makes debugging a nightmare. > Make sure your giant runtime system is justified. If you can't easily > build standalone applications, you chop out a big chunk of the market. Standalone applications are never a problem. It's when your RTS might interact in adverse ways with other aspects of a more complex environment that you can get into trouble. Fortunately, people have worked hard so that this is not a problem with the new Ada implementations. /Jon -- Jon Anthony Organon Motives, Inc. 1 Williston Road, Suite 4 Belmont, MA 02178 617.484.3383 jsa@organon.com