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=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 5b1e799cdb,3ef3e78eacf6f938 X-Google-Attributes: gid5b1e799cdb,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,UTF8 Path: g2news2.google.com!news1.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!backlog2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.brightview.co.uk!news.brightview.co.uk.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 08:00:16 -0500 From: Jon Harrop Subject: Re: Alternatives to C: ObjectPascal, Eiffel, Ada or Modula-3? Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.modula3,comp.programming Followup-To: comp.lang.eiffel,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.modula3,comp.programming Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:09:53 +0100 References: <51617b48-400b-4296-9362-78aa712bb6b2@a7g2000yqk.googlegroups.com> Organization: Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. User-Agent: KNode/0.10.9 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit Message-ID: X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-GZsk9b6WJuu59NGzudmDtNC40biJ+eCo9SWGLb9kclLKZMQSQBuv4T7Mj0xWPhzQtRxUAXeBsvXOrsh!FRMQVSTgvGPZMSvUNI4Khfo7hTYQcsWXjWVKlQG9y5kfX/qlVZYfZwzFg3c9bn+HRiroJBL8hIt+!BJD2SVa6p77arlD4Ynd8XxF9 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: 1.3.39 X-Original-Bytes: 3909 Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.eiffel:357 comp.lang.ada:7226 comp.lang.modula3:65 comp.programming:11940 Date: 2009-07-21T15:09:53+01:00 List-Id: Martin wrote: > On Jul 21, 1:25 pm, Jon Harrop wrote: > [snip] >> I am very surprised at the list of languages you arrived at! FreePascal, >> Eiffel and Modula-3 are all essentially dead. Ada is alive but sacrificed >> many hugely-productive forms of abstraction (e.g. first-class functions) >> in order to be optimally suitable for embedded programming. Unless you're >> planning on number crunching on a PIC, which I seriously doubt, Ada would >> be a step in the wrong direction. > > You take the 'embedded' tag given to Ada too stongly - it's a general > language with very good support for embedded domains (but also > others). > > Runtime performance wise, you can usually get something akin to 'C'- > like speed. Switching off all runtime checks and the difference is > (obviously) even smaller. I do not doubt that. My concern about Ada is primarily that it prohibits many conventional and hugely-productive mainstream abstractions like first-class lexical closures. Those are particularly beneficial in the context of scientific computing. >> I specialize in scientific computing and I've never heard of anyone using >> any of those languages for it. I doubt any even have efficient >> implementations by modern standards. > > That's will come as a huge shock to the guys over at NARVAL [http:// > www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/09/090207-fosdem/05-narval.pdf]!!! > :-) > > In their own words: > > "It is a distributed data acquisition software system > that collects and processes data from nuclear and > particles physics detectors. NARVAL replaces an older > system based on C, Fortran and proprietary technologies > with Ada and Debian GNU/Linux and is itself Free > Software." In their own words, they are trying to replace a system that is running on embedded 68k CPUs. > Sounds pretty scientific to me...and there are plenty others, e.g. > some Astrophysics work [http://homepage.univie.ac.at/martin.stift/]. Might be interesting to translate some of the examples in those lecture notes from Ada to a more modern language. > AdaCore have 150+ universities signed up for the Academic package > offering tools and support for free (beer & speech) [http:// > www.adacore.com/home/academia/] - I doubt very many of them are using > PICs!! ;-) That link says that Ada is: "the right choice for courses in elementary programming" -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?u