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,UTF8 Path: g2news2.google.com!news2.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!backlog2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.brightview.co.uk!news.brightview.co.uk.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 09:56:26 -0500 From: Jon Harrop Subject: Re: Alternatives to C: ObjectPascal, Eiffel, Ada or Modula-3? Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.modula3,comp.programming Followup-To: comp.lang.eiffel,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.modula3,comp.programming Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:06:04 +0100 References: <51617b48-400b-4296-9362-78aa712bb6b2@a7g2000yqk.googlegroups.com> Organization: Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. User-Agent: KNode/0.10.9 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit Message-ID: X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-drd8nJn9k6cVEDi+olhGYuhgS8+EkupDkOu+NLrRY3FMwCQdY1jgRz2Tj5yv9j5UZZljIoTLdkBpdg4!BESVWGPVdSH6y3y8gQMvB3QYwXK6m10p54PxBDEPWsYe2wKc3yY1SbmCrrLiU+jy/ktdI51evgj9!IJFTV43Kkhc7DhfHKKdzdIE/ X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.39 X-Original-Bytes: 4202 Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.eiffel:371 comp.lang.ada:7244 comp.lang.modula3:75 comp.programming:11951 Date: 2009-07-21T17:06:04+01:00 List-Id: Martin wrote: > On Jul 21, 3:09 pm, Jon Harrop wrote: >> 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. Not according to John Barnes' "Rationale for Ada 2005": http://www.adaic.org/standards/05rat/html/Rat-3-4.html > [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. If they are still running on embedded 68k CPUs then it cannot be very computationally intensive work by today's standards. They seem to be just gathering a not-huge amount of data which is neither interesting nor relevant in this context. >> > 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. Fortran did parallelism before Ada and the current "flavour-of-the-month boys" like Cilk and .NET 4 provide modern solutions for parallelism built upon wait-free work-stealing concurrent deques that Ada not only does not have but cannot even express. > 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. What do you mean by "lambda support" if not first-class lexical closures? >> > 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. In the embedded space, perhaps. > 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... Not according to the latest Ada specification, AFAICT. -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?u