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: 103376,4a36b7df69d1af90 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Brian Rogoff Subject: Re: Announcing JGNAT public version 1.0p Date: 2000/04/11 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 609689321 References: <8bqd8g$sbs$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <8c2613$hce$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <8c7fh4$25g$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <8c92nl$nqn$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <8cak93$dtl$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <38EA152B.6D7A4481@earthlink.net> <1MNG4.630$n8.195854@news-east.usenetserver.com> <38ECB0CC.3B2941E2@earthlink.net> <8ckscp$nv7$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <8cs4ad$ft3$1@clnews.edf.fr> <8ct83j$ho3$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <8ct9eb$baq1@news.cis.okstate.edu> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Trace: nntp1.ba.best.com 955467882 225 bpr@206.184.139.136 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 2000-04-11T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: On 10 Apr 2000, David Starner wrote: > On Mon, 10 Apr 2000 18:55:55 GMT, 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