Re: Announcing JGNAT public version 1.0p

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On 10 Apr 2000, David Starner wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Apr 2000 18:55:55 GMT, hugin777@my-deja.com <hugin777@my-deja.com> wrote:
> >PS: I do not really _want_ to calculate primes :-) I just wanted to see
> >how it looked like in ML, Ada and Java. But when I ran it I got a
> >surprise !!
> >
> >PPS: I have just begun studying CS in Denmark (DIKU, Copenhagen), where
> >they apparently love ML. I haven't met others interested in Ada yet.
> >They all seem to prefer the short'n'fast way of ML; sadly. Maybe there's
> >no hope for them... ;-)

Ouch! Some of us Ada fans are actually ML fans too. But I agree that the 
DIKU folks have it all wrong since they favor SML, rather than OCaml. 
Don't they know yet that all of the best programming languages have a 
strong French design heritage? ;-)

Seriously though, SML is a fine language to learn. Knowing proper ML style
will help you write clean Ada code in the same way that knowing Ada helps 
you to write clean C code. If I'm not mistaken, the SML module system
even had some impact on the design of Ada 95, in particular generic
formal package parameters.

I suspect though that SML may be the one language that even Robert Dewar
wouldn't learn from its formal definition :-). 

> ML and Ada aren't really in competition. Ada is a safety orientated, strongly
> typed imperative langauage. ML is a writablity orientated, weirdly typed (-:,
> functional language. ML's an excellent language to do prototypes and proofs
> of concept in, whereas Ada and most other low level (compared to ML) languages
> aren't. OTOH, ML usually isn't the appropriate language for a shipping
> product. 

Ouch again a few times. Weirdly typed? Writability orientated? 

BTW, the company I work for ships a product in (OCa)ML. I see no reason
why it is less appropriate than say Perl, Tcl, Python, or Java, all of
which are used in shipping products.

> Last time I tried to run a big program in ML, it got bogged down, 
> swapping stuff in and out of core. When I tried rewriting in Ada, I kept 
> having bugs in what ML did automatically (my lists implementation, 
> in specific). 

That's a complaint about implementation, not language. People used to
complain that Ada code was slow, too. 

-- Brian