Re: Alternatives to C: ObjectPascal, Eiffel, Ada or Modula-3?

[Martin <martin.dowie@btopenworld.com>]

On Jul 21, 3:09 pm, Jon Harrop <j...@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
> Martin wrote:
> > On Jul 21, 1:25 pm, Jon Harrop <j...@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
> > [snip]
> >> I am very surprised at the list of languages you arrived at! FreePascal,
> >> Eiffel and Modula-3 are all essentially dead. Ada is alive but sacrificed
> >> many hugely-productive forms of abstraction (e.g. first-class functions)
> >> in order to be optimally suitable for embedded programming. Unless you're
> >> planning on number crunching on a PIC, which I seriously doubt, Ada would
> >> be a step in the wrong direction.
>
> > You take the 'embedded' tag given to Ada too stongly - it's a general
> > language with very good support for embedded domains (but also
> > others).
>
> > Runtime performance wise, you can usually get something akin to 'C'-
> > like speed. Switching off all runtime checks and the difference is
> > (obviously) even smaller.
>
> I do not doubt that. My concern about Ada is primarily that it prohibits
> many conventional and hugely-productive mainstream abstractions like
> first-class lexical closures. Those are particularly beneficial in the
> context of scientific computing.

But I'm afraid it does...20 years ago it didn't.


[snip]
> In their own words, they are trying to replace a system that is running on
> embedded 68k CPUs.

Yes, that's right...and they are replacing them with GNU/Linux
bozes...you didn't read far enough.


> > Sounds pretty scientific to me...and there are plenty others, e.g.
> > some Astrophysics work [http://homepage.univie.ac.at/martin.stift/].
>
> Might be interesting to translate some of the examples in those lecture
> notes from Ada to a more modern language.

There's plenty that's modern about Ada - it did multi-core natively
and portably long before the current flavour-of-the-month boys came to
the party.

The one thing that is missing is lambda support but that doesn't
bother me to much given the sort of domains I work in. I think I heard
it was being considered for the next language revision.


> > AdaCore have 150+ universities signed up for the Academic package
> > offering tools and support for free (beer & speech) [http://
> >www.adacore.com/home/academia/] - I doubt very many of them are using
> > PICs!! ;-)
>
> That link says that Ada is:
>
>   "the right choice for courses in elementary programming"

Nothing wrong with that - it's also very well suited to intermediate
and advanced programming.

I've nothing against functional languages (my thesis used SML/
NJ)...but I'm afraid your making assertions about Ada that just aren't
true...

Cheers
-- Martin