Re: Question on Ada Expressive Power

[Jacob Sparre Andersen <sparre@nbi.dk>]

pnkflyd831@gmail.com writes:

> Does anyone have any statistics on the Expressive Power of Ada in
> terms of lines of Ada code to lines of Assembly code?

The GNU/Ada (GNAT) compiler should be able to help you extract this
number given some source code.  IIRC the relevant command line option
is "-S".

You can download the source code for quite a few Ada programs and
libraries, so there's nothing which prevents you from doing the
measurements yourself.

> Additional data would be useful as it affects the usefulness of the
> statistic, however limited data is better than none so any
> contributions would be much appreciated.  Target platform, compiler
> used, optimization settings, would probably be relevant.

With GNU/Ada it would be relatively easy to get numbers for different
optimization settings.  If you design the experiment and announce it
here, you can probably get help with running it on platforms you
haven't got access to yourself.

> Also aspects of the language used: tagged types, access types,
> tasks, protected objects, dynamic allocation, exception handling
> ect...

I would suggest that you download a collection of Ada source files and
classify them according to the various aspects of the language you're
interested in.  The rough classification can probably be done using
some regular expressions (`grep` on POSIX systems).

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
"Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out,
 but that is not the reason we are doing it"
                                          -- Richard Feynman