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: 103376,6609c40f81b32989 X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!g10g2000yqh.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Jerry Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Why is Ada considered "too specialized" for scientific use Date: Sun, 4 Apr 2010 16:41:06 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 75.172.190.109 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1270424466 2574 127.0.0.1 (4 Apr 2010 23:41:06 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 4 Apr 2010 23:41:06 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: g10g2000yqh.googlegroups.com; posting-host=75.172.190.109; posting-account=x5rpZwoAAABMN2XPwcebPWPkebpwQNJG User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-US) AppleWebKit/528.16+(KHTML, like Gecko, Safari/528.16) OmniWeb/v622.8.0,gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:10837 Date: 2010-04-04T16:41:06-07:00 List-Id: On Apr 3, 9:46=A0pm, "Nasser M. Abbasi" wrote: snip > Is there something in > Ada which makes it hard to use for =A0scientific =A0programming? > snip --Nasser No. I use Ada every day in my personal research and it is outstanding. I can choose any language that I want and I chose Ada. I have used other languages for research, mainly Pascal, Fortran--a long time ago, commercial packages starting with the letter "M", Igor Pro, SuperCollider, ChucK, and others. Some of these remain in my bag of tricks and as most on this list will agree, you need knowledge of several languages and you should pick the best for the job. For everyday general technical computing, that, for me, is Ada. There have been discussions on this list in the past about the relative lack of technical libraries for Ada. I find that (despite criticism from some quarters) that Numerical Recipes is excellent--it gets the job done. (There is an Ada version that has been used as a demonstration of the P2Ada language converter. I don't know of the copyright issues of this, but I own rights to the Pascal version so I'm covered, I suppose.) In any case, numerical code is usually pretty simple (structurally) and you can easily do your own conversion from Pascal or Fortran or C. There are also Ada bindings to LAPACK and BLAS. Indeed, I believe that that is the official implementation in GNAT for the new-to-Ada 2005 numerical functions. LAPACK and BLAS have been around for so long they are probably bullet-proof by now. There is also the GNU Scientific Library for which the Ada binding is sparse, last time I checked. I think it would be an excellent project to get this up to where it is generally useful. Jerry