Re: Ada is getting more popular!

[ramon_garcia <ramon.garcia.f@gmail.com>]

As a newcomer into Ada, perhaps I can have a useful point of view of
what makes it difficult to enter this language.

Here are my complains in decreasing order:

- Vendor dependency: there are few vendors of Ada products. It is
neccessary in practice to use vendor extensions to write useful
software. For instance, I must depend on array accesses in GNAT
containing both the addess and the bounds of the array. In addition, I
also depend on the implementation recomendation that array'adress
points to the first element. I also need the extension
object'unrestricted_pointer. Vendor dependency is increased by the
lack of a community. It does not work googling for an Ada issue, like
with Java or Linux APIs. This newsgroup is the only resource that I
have yet found. I don't have a problem for paying for using an Ada
tool. (I am writing free software at the moment, but perhaps not in
the future). But, how much? There is no pricing information in the
Adacore website, and if for whatever reason I have an unsuccessful
experience with them I have no alternative.

  My message to vendors is that it is more profitable to be the 10 %
of 100.000.000 sales than 100 % of 1000 sales. It is neccessary to
have a good free compiler and IDE to build a community.

- Complex language that requries plenty of typing. This can be avoided
with good developing environments that automate the task, like Eclipse
does for Java. Adacore's GPS is not too bad, but not nearly as
polished as Eclipse. At least I would expect to have an option "new
package" that defines a package spec and body. Or that declaring a
function in the spec creates an empty body (this is posible in Emacs,
but not in GPS, only creating all the body from all the spec with gnat-
stub rather than adding a function to the body from a new function to
the spec).

- Missing language features. Such a complex language must have design
issues. I find suprising that Object'Pool_Address extension from GNAT
is not standard. (It is a little inconsistent and bogus, by the way).
Some things are almost imposible or require difficult contorsions. For
instnace, I have not yet found a reasonable way to insert an array of
discriminated elements in a discriminated record. Something like

type my_container(counter: integer, discriminated_attribute: integer)
is record
   data: array(0..counter) of contained(discriminated_attribute);
end record;

This straightforward way is not posible because one cannot use an
anonymous array type inside a record (by the way, I find this feature
unjustified). But, even defining a type for the array does not work
because there is no way of passing the attribute from my_container to
the contained elements.

For instance, think about a data structure like

m, n: integer

m times:
    flaga: boolean;
    array of n bytes;

The desiable way of representing this model is imposible.

Of course, all of this can be solved with enough contorsions.

This is just an example of a particular issue that I find. The concept
is that a complex design has many rough edges.

On Oct 13, 9:15 am, "Nasser M. Abbasi" <n...@12000.org> wrote:
> Ada has jumped in TIOBE index from 29 last year to 17 this year, well done.
>
> It is now ranked 17, ahead of SAS and Matlab !
>
> "The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity
> of programming languages"
>
> http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
>
> --Nasser