Re: Ada communicating with other programs

["M. A. Alves" <maa@liacc.up.pt>]

On Tue, 20 Nov 2001, Siegfried Gonzi wrote:
> Actually I am learning a little bit Ada 95, therefore a few questions:
>
> a) Is it hard for Ada to communicate with other programs?

No.

> I often have to deal with big array computations. Currently, I am
> using Clean

Give us a reference, please.

> . . .
>
> aa) Is it hard in Ada to do "semi command line programming".

What is that?

> . . .
>
> b) How easy is it in Ada to read in a file of the following structure:
>
> Day,Time,Val1,Val2
> 01:23:2001,12:23:34,2.3445,233.34
> 02:03:2001,13:45:00,2,344,222
>
> . . .
>
> The Clean program consits of nearly 100 lines of code. I ask here "how
> easy can it be in Ada", because I have been really depressed and asked
> myself why I have to waste my time with such things and is there a
> clearer way extracting the values.

It is very easy to do it in Ada, but do expect a big number of lines.  If
you want tersness use a "write-only" language like any of the C
derivatives outhere e.g. PERL---but then be prepare to waste some serious
time chasing bugs.

You you cleary state the specs for the program you're currently
implementing in 100-lines of Clean I can try to show you how to do it in
Ada as your first tutorial ;-)

> c) Is there an aha experience when one is confronted in Ada with "not
> having the goody called garbage-collection".

I haven't felt the need for that yet.  In Ada you can do everything
keeping the variables under a nice (dynamic as well as static) scope.
(And of course some guys will tell you how garbage collection slows things
down.)

> . . . pointer-free programming.

Ditto.

> d) Often visualization tools support calling foreign functions, but
> often only  C or Fortran. But will it be possible to also call a
> compiled Ada function from this tools (lets say Scilab) . . .

If your tool is (in) a C or Fortran library you should have no problem
linking it with Ada programs.  I do it all the time.  Chances are there is
already an Ada package binding the library.

Welcome to Ada ;-)

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