Re: Do people who use Ada also use ocaml or F#?

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

Le Fri, 29 Oct 2010 04:27:40 +0200, Chad  R. Meiners  
<chad.rmeiners@gmail.com> a écrit:
> I am love the elegance of static typing
> without explicit type declarations
Type inference may seems appealing due to its conciseness. Just that as  
source become bigger, you do not enjoy it any more.

> Do any other Ada programmers also use functional languages like
> these?  If so, has anyone given any thoughts on how to incorporate the
> nice features of both languages?
Ada 2012 introduced something looking like coroutines with the yield  
function (formally, generators), which is a famous feature of functional  
paradigm languages (gonna be great for kinds of streams of any kind of  
data or iterators).

However, adding this and that “cool” feature of that language A in this  
language B, is easier said than done (you guess?), although this may be a  
popular topic.

Cannot reply this question unless you precisely say which feature and for  
what reason. A lot of job is done by the maintainers (and in some part,  
the Ada community), to preserve Ada language definition's soundness. Too  
much risky to talk about adding features just because it sounds cool and  
buzzy without more reasons (this is not a target). So the question : what  
feature and for which reason ?

Honestly, I feel just a few things are missing to Ada, and this have  
nothing to deal with functional paradigm (which is one among numerous  
others), as these are more subtilities related to what Ada is already,  
like the topic of extendable enumerations which pops-up again a few days  
ago.

I personally enjoy the paradigm of functional programing (and many others  
do, the Ada community is open-mind and enjoy to learn to understand), but  
this is clearly not Ada's target and its principle of least-surprise  
(predictability). Functional programming better express a modal than a  
concrete implementation. As I suppose you know, there are many talks about  
the ability of this/that xML compiler to produce efficient binary  
application. Ada clearly has nothing to deal with this kind of question,  
as talks about Ada compilers even goes the opposite way, and more talks  
about “does that compiler really compiles the input it gets without any  
error or bad alterations ?”. What you may understand, is that this do  
exactly the opposite of what a functional programming language compiler is  
expected to do.

In shorter words : yes, many people in the Ada world know about FP, its  
part of their culture; if they use Ada instead of FP (for some things),  
that is not because they do not know enough about FP; and last, Ada is not  
and will never be an FP language (but feel free to create an FP compiler  
targeting Ada).

If Ada tends to integrate some features, these are more the one suggested  
by SPARK users expectations (SPARK is a language intended to run formal  
proofs of correctness on an Ada program) or by some Ada profiles for  
short-memory systems, short time response systems, etc. FP does not really  
help here (well, FP is in some way related to formal proofs, but only in  
its own language area… adding FP features to Ada will not help to make Ada  
designs easier to prove).

Still feel free to tell about your concrete ideas.


-- 
Si les chats miaulent et font autant de vocalises bizarres, c’est pas pour  
les chiens.