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=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no 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!o30g2000yqb.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: mockturtle Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Why is Ada considered "too specialized" for scientific use Date: Mon, 5 Apr 2010 02:09:53 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 93.37.248.222 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1270458593 29048 127.0.0.1 (5 Apr 2010 09:09:53 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 5 Apr 2010 09:09:53 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: o30g2000yqb.googlegroups.com; posting-host=93.37.248.222; posting-account=9fwclgkAAAD6oQ5usUYhee1l39geVY99 User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.10,gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:10843 Date: 2010-04-05T02:09:53-07:00 List-Id: On Apr 4, 6:46=A0am, "Nasser M. Abbasi" wrote: > I was browsing the net for scientific software written in Ada, and came > across this strange statement: > > http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/329/lectures/node7.html > > "Scientific programming languages > What is the best high-level language to use for scientific programming? > This, unfortunately, is a highly contentious question. Over the years, > literally hundreds of high-level languages have been developed. However, = few > have stood the test of time. Many languages (e.g., Algol, Pascal, Haskell= ) > can be dismissed as ephemeral computer science fads. Others (e.g., Cobol, > Lisp, Ada) are too specialized to adapt for scientific use. Let me add just my 2.0e-2... I do research in communication and signal processing and this requires lots of programming (although I am not a professional programmer). To be honest, most of my "number crunching" stuff is done in Matlab, since they usually are "fast and dirty" tests of new algorithms and Matlab has lots of numerical algorithms ready off-the-shelf. However, for my long lived projects Ada is without doubts my first choice (that I impose to my students too... :-]). I must confess also that my third favorite language (for fast-and-dirty text-crunching scripts) is something almost opposite to Ada in term of philosophy: Ruby. ;-) Back to the main topic, maybe the only defect of Ada in number crunching is the lack of some extensive numerical library (but it does not seem to me that C, C++ or Java are especially good on this...)