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=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: a07f3367d7,c0e0c959f5ef11b4 X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Received: by 10.66.77.230 with SMTP id v6mr665321paw.20.1343188884703; Tue, 24 Jul 2012 21:01:24 -0700 (PDT) Path: p10ni52815943pbh.1!nntp.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border4.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!ctu-peer!news.nctu.edu.tw!goblin1!goblin.stu.neva.ru!postnews.google.com!oo8g2000pbc.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: wrp Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Pre-Ada95 books still worth reading Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2012 12:09:12 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 75.170.58.122 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Trace: posting.google.com 1342725060 847 127.0.0.1 (19 Jul 2012 19:11:00 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2012 19:11:00 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: oo8g2000pbc.googlegroups.com; posting-host=75.170.58.122; posting-account=_xNmGgoAAADzVbG1LIrTaXAR97KD43ZC User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0) Gecko/20110327 Firefox/4.0 Iceweasel/4.0,gzip(gfe) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Date: 2012-07-19T12:09:12-07:00 List-Id: On Jul 14, 2:13=A0pm, wrp wrote: > ...I have combed through the older > titles, looking for books that might still be worthwhile reading for > the Ada95/05/12 programmer. It turns out that somebody around here did have some of these books, so I've been able to review them. Ford. 1986. Scientific Ada. Although scientific computing is not my area, I found this book really interesting. It gives an in-depth discussion of issues in creating numerical libraries and the use of Ada 83 for that purpose. Several of the contributors worked on NAG libraries in Fortran or Algol 68, so they had a lot of practical knowledge to draw on. They were writing at a time when people thought that Fortran was going to fade away and soon everyone would be using Ada, so they spent a lot of time discussing aspects in which they thought Ada wasn't as good as Fortran. Their biggest complaint was about access types, but I think later Ada answered those complaints. They have several other concerns that still seem relevant, though. For the general programmer, Ch. 5 "Ada and other Scientific Languages: A Critique", will be the most interesting part. It briefly compares Ada 83 and Fortran 77. In short, they say Ada is much nicer for general programming but much worse for numerics. Of course, modern Fortran is little like F77. Gautier. 1990. Software Reuse with Ada. This is about 200 pages of small print, containing contributed papers from a workshop on the subject of the title. The content is for the most part general observations you could find in any text on software engineering. About half the book describes usage of particular Ada features. While the information may be some use, my impression was that most of the advice was obvious to an experienced programmer. There are also many criticisms of Ada, but they seem to be things that were addressed in Ada 95. Gehani. 1984. Ada: Concurrent Programming. Well, writing is choppy, coverage is sketchy, code is old-style, and he uses some obsolete features, but Gehani occasionally presents an idea more clearly than do Burns & Wellings in _Concurrent and Real- Time Programming in Ada_. Some interesting references in the annotated bibliography. Habermann. 1983. Ada for Experienced Programmers. The goal of this book is to present major features of Ada to experienced Pascal programmers. To that end, it has 16 chapters, following the format 1) present a problem, 2) discuss how to solve it in Pascal, 3) discuss how to solve it in Ada. The writing is not polished and explanations are minimal. Even if I knew Pascal well, I wouldn't choose this book to learn anything about Ada. Also, the quality of the Ada code doesn't seem great, maybe because it's pre-Ada 83. Keeffe. 1985. PULSE: An Ada-based Distributed Operating System. This is a sketchy description of a project to create a Unix-like distributed operation system with Ada. They fudged quite a bit on the Ada part, as they wrote the kernel in C for efficiency reasons. There are only two subjects on which they get into interesting detail. First is their distributed file system, which turned out to give very poor performance relative to Unix. The other is their great dissatisfaction with Ada's tasking model, which they discuss in a 35-page appendix. I think, but am not sure, that Ada 2005 dealt with their issues.