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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,5cb36983754f64da X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2004-04-02 16:08:55 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!news.glorb.com!wn12feed!worldnet.att.net!bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net.POSTED!not-for-mail From: David Starner Subject: Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping language) User-Agent: Pan/0.14.2 (This is not a psychotic episode. It's a cleansing moment of clarity. (Debian GNU/Linux)) Message-Id: Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada References: <20040206174017.7E84F4C4114@lovelace.ada-france.org> <54759e7e.0402071124.322ea376@posting.google.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Date: Sat, 03 Apr 2004 00:08:55 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 12.72.71.192 X-Complaints-To: abuse@worldnet.att.net X-Trace: bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net 1080950935 12.72.71.192 (Sat, 03 Apr 2004 00:08:55 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 03 Apr 2004 00:08:55 GMT Organization: AT&T Worldnet Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:6710 Date: 2004-04-03T00:08:55+00:00 List-Id: On Fri, 02 Apr 2004 18:18:42 -0500, Beth Bruzan wrote: > In short, I would say that if it cannot be done in Ada, there is a good > chance that it SHOULDN'T be done at all. Ah, just what the world needs, another advocate. Ran into a Haskell webpage that told me programs with strong typing can't crash. Some language advocates make me feel like I'm trying to buy a used car. Of course it can be done in Ada; Ada is Turing-complete and is a fairly low-level language with machine-code insertions. Back in the real world, however, Ada isn't always the right solution. ACT processes some of GNAT's docs with a program written in SNOBOL, and it's not because they lack experience in Ada. Ada is a fairly low level language; stepping further away from the machine level can make code more reliable and easy to read. > However, with proper design > and implementation, Ada does not need garbage collection, And with proper design and implementation, C does not need bounds checking. If your allocation and deallocation is trivial, you don't need garbage collection; but if you look at something like GCC, they implemented garbage collection in C because it was too much work to keep track of the allocations. I have no doubt they would have done the same thing in Ada. > optimizations can be done (and for most compilers do) at compile-time. It's frequently hard to predict which way a branch will go at compile-time, and even if you do profile driven optimization, you can't handle per session data changes. Those types of optimizations can only be done at run-time. > Admittedly, Ada does have to be recompiled for each platform, but then > it runs without the need for a virtual machine, and is inherently more > efficient. On top of this, you can develop Ada that compiles to > bytecode, and runs well on virtual machines. I might quibble about "inherently more efficient"; optimizations as above mean there's probably a program in some research lab that runs faster under their virtual machine than it could directly compiled for the system. More importantly, Java is the same as Ada here; it can be natively compiled or compiled for the JVM and in theory other virtual machines.