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,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,1116ece181be1aea X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-09-06 21:59:22 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: 18k11tm001@sneakemail.com (Russ) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Is the Writing on the Wall for Ada? Date: 6 Sep 2003 21:59:21 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 63.194.87.148 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1062910762 10598 127.0.0.1 (7 Sep 2003 04:59:22 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 7 Sep 2003 04:59:22 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:42223 Date: 2003-09-07T04:59:22+00:00 List-Id: "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" wrote in message news:... > This is not a troll... but I am soliciting some opinion. > > I read a disturbing article in the July COTS Journal recently, > and thought I would bounce the controversial aspects off > of the group. The complete article can be read at: > > http://www.cotsjournalonline.com/pdfs/2003/07/COTS07_softside.pdf Thanks for posting this link. I've been trying to wake the Ada community up to this reality for a while. I work in air traffic management, a "traditional" Ada stronghold, and I sense firsthand that Ada may even be dying even there. I had taken solace in the fact that Boeing seemed to be sticking with Ada, but according to the article even that is evaporating. Also, I have some contact with a high-level academic consortium called the High Dependability Computing Program (HDCP), and Ada barely registers on their radar screen. They all seem to use Java. Personally, I like Ada, and I think its a shame that it seems to be getting short shrift. I consider Ada to be fundamentally solid, and I don't understand why it is not considered young and sexy anymore. Then again, I am a very independent thinker, and I am willing to ignore fads. Here are the main problems I see with Java: First of all, Java forces everything into the "object-oriented" mold whether it fits or not. As far as I am concerned, that's just tacky. Another problem with Java is that it requires that *all* instances of user-defined types be put on the heap. That's a heap of crap. Java has no "generics" or "templates" either. The other deficiency of Java compared to Ada is that it has no separately compiled specification files, which are invaluable for large system integration, as you all know. I have said in the past in this forum that I consider the syntax of Ada to be unnecessarily awkward and clunky. I have also suggested that perhaps that is part of the reason Ada is not embraced by the trend-setters. I got nothing but flack in response. Perhaps its time to rethink that possibility. I have written a simple preprocessor in Python that implements a new, cleaner dialect of Ada that I call MyAda. It requires no semicolons at the end of lines (but it allows them to separate multiple statements on a line, as in Python and Fortran 95). Also, it uses "=" in place of ":=" and "=>". I would also make it enforce consistent indentation like Python, but I haven't done that yet (it will keep the "end" statements, of course). I have also written the inverse preprocessor, so you can go back and forth between Ada and MyAda. I have tested my preprocessors on several Ada packages (from one of the Ada websites -- can't remember which), and I have found that I get the same exact Ada code back when I go from Ada to MyAda and back. I note also that C, C++, Java, Perl, and Python, the five more popular general purpose languages around today, all have augmented assignment operators, and it it is still painfully obvious to me that Ada needs them too. But it is also painfully obvious to me that most Ada veterans are blind to this reality. Too bad -- for Ada.