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=-0.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,93a8e26f233f1cde X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Received: by 10.68.202.168 with SMTP id kj8mr323578pbc.1.1334175575735; Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:19:35 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 Path: r9ni45170pbh.0!nntp.google.com!news1.google.com!goblin3!goblin1!goblin2!goblin.stu.neva.ru!aioe.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: anon@att.net Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Does Ada still competitive? Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2012 20:19:29 +0000 (UTC) Organization: Aioe.org NNTP Server Message-ID: References: <2667883.6.1334114293790.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@pblw1> Reply-To: anon@anon.org NNTP-Posting-Host: NodWG1bCoxkBouZ638fp5A.user.speranza.aioe.org X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.8.2 X-Newsreader: IBM NewsReader/2 2.0 Date: 2012-04-11T20:19:29+00:00 List-Id: No! Ada is dying by a painful and slow death! Yes, there will always be a few that will try to play with Ada but the day of moving code to Ada is over and done with. Like, it was report here a few weeks ago, NASA is now pulling it Ada support. And most satellite and other companies went C in early 2000s. One reason is the change to "Return by Type" from "Return by reference" which started around 2007. The problem with "Return by Type" is that the "Generic package" must be compiled within the routine or package that uses it. Which means the "Generic package" is a one application only so why use generic in the first place. But companies like NASA over the years have created 1_000s of external "Generic packages" that are for multiple projects and at writing and compile time the "Generic package" has no concept of what type will be use. So the usage of "Return by Type" cause compiler errors on a massive scale on external. generic packages. This is one of many proof that Ada is not backward compatible. So, company like NASA are moving away from Ada to a more stable language that is 100% backward compatible like C. No rewrites on any package only compile, link and execute. A second problem is that every year the ARG is moving Ada toward a C like language. An example is in Ada 2012, is functions now can use "in out" within the parameter list, such as function ( : in out ; : in out ) return ; Which is classical C version of a procedure routine with the "return_type" being a error code. So, will the "Exceptions" and exception handler be next to be removed from Ada in 2020. That's a problem with existing Ada programmers, being that they may be forced to make 100s of re-writes to remove exceptions that no one want to do. And the ARG can not say for certain that exception will exist in Ada 2020 or after, until they vote on Ada 2020 RM sometime in 2020 or later. A third is the "Not null" clause that are use in routine's parameter list starting with Ada 2005. That cause introduces inefficiency error checking at the beginning of the routine that can not be truly optimized. This is, just like the C like "pragma Assert" which add very inefficiency code into one programs. There are others concepts that software division in companies like NASA or software shops do not like the direction Ada is going in because of the ARG. Plus, the number of new Ada programmers are limited. Most small schools only teach languages that are under the Microsoft ".NET" umbrella or JAVA which mean Ada is not taught. And in large Universities the cost of a single class is too high to experiment just to learn a language that is being phased out by most programming departments. In <2667883.6.1334114293790.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@pblw1>, Sunny writes: >Hi all! >I like the programming language. >But I saw a sentence on TOIBE index definition, it said that: "Ada is hardly used for new mission-critical systems anymore." Is that true? >And does Ada still teach in university and used in works? >Thanks! >Sun