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 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 5b1e799cdb,3ef3e78eacf6f938 X-Google-Attributes: gid5b1e799cdb,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!o7g2000yqb.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Martin Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.modula3,comp.programming Subject: Re: Alternatives to C: ObjectPascal, Eiffel, Ada or Modula-3? Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 06:41:28 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: <51617b48-400b-4296-9362-78aa712bb6b2@a7g2000yqk.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 20.133.0.8 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1248183688 21638 127.0.0.1 (21 Jul 2009 13:41:28 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:41:28 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: o7g2000yqb.googlegroups.com; posting-host=20.133.0.8; posting-account=g4n69woAAACHKbpceNrvOhHWViIbdQ9G User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.12) Gecko/2009070611 Firefox/3.0.12,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.eiffel:361 comp.lang.ada:7231 comp.lang.modula3:69 comp.programming:11944 Date: 2009-07-21T06:41:28-07:00 List-Id: On Jul 21, 3:09=A0pm, Jon Harrop wrote: > Martin wrote: > > On Jul 21, 1:25=A0pm, Jon Harrop wrote: > > [snip] > >> I am very surprised at the list of languages you arrived at! FreePasca= l, > >> Eiffel and Modula-3 are all essentially dead. Ada is alive but sacrifi= ced > >> many hugely-productive forms of abstraction (e.g. first-class function= s) > >> in order to be optimally suitable for embedded programming. Unless you= 're > >> planning on number crunching on a PIC, which I seriously doubt, Ada wo= uld > >> 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 o= n > 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: > > =A0 "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