Re: ada without ada libraries?

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Le Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:45:31 +0100, Dmitry A. Kazakov  
<mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> a écrit:
>> No language at all,
>> not even Ada, could be an universal model for everything.
>
> Since when a language became a model?

Always been for me. I see Ada as a language providing a set of low level  
models. All languages comes with their own model, even natural language  
(people are just not aware of that fact).

> If you want to be serious in pushing your argument, you have to show how
> and why the domain's specific fails to fit into a strongly typed,
> imperative, OO framework.

First is readability. A DSL provide a specific set of vocabulary and a  
syntax which, if well designed, emphase things where needed. Using Ada for  
some things, would be like using assembly instead of Ada. With Ada you  
don't have to care about setting‑up stack frame and cleaning it on return  
nor you have to care about register vs memory allocation. The same way,  
some domain don't have to care about private/public, limited/non‑limited,  
local/library‑level. You could provide some package holding the  
functionnalities of a DSL, a attempt to right what a DSL do in a simple  
Ada program, but you will miss conciness and specifically designed context  
which come with a DSL and help to focus on the DSL domain only.


> The only debatable position here is actually declarative vs. imperative.
> But it won't fly with scripting languages anyway.

It precisely do.

>> and some scripting
>> languages, like LISP or derivatives, or logic programming languages,  
>> are a
>> kind of.
>
> ... mess.
Either you use it badly, or it is just not well suited to you in  
particular. Does not imply this cannot suite well someones else.

What would be a real mess, would be an attempt to express Prolog clauses  
with Ada arrays (arrays with anonymous types, of course; don't even think  
about named array sub‑types). Would be bloated with no added value for  
what matters to Prolog users. You would nearly have to create a new  
derived type for each clauses if you wanted it to be real Ada.

Similar comments could apply with others, including some as common as SQL  
is.

This does not mean all are good or perfect (SQL syntax is not good to me),  
I just mean trying to replace all with Ada would make things worst.

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University