Suggestions to a Newbie

Suggestions to a Newbie

[Cagdas Ozgenc]

Hi,

I am interested in learning Ada 95. Could you please recommend:

1) A starter's book for a programmer with solid experience in programming
with many other languages. Basically I do not want a book that teaches what
recursion is etc. Also it would be better if it directly gets into practical
applications with OO paradigm, without talking about what OO is.

2) A compiler for Windows NT, with a dedicated IDE. Free or commercial
doesn't matter. Free would be better, but if the compiler and the IDE are
developed by different people, or companies, I really do not want to go
through the hell of configuring a generic IDE to run externally a compiler,
and its debugger.

Also, can we say that Ada is an allround language, or is it targeted for a
specific field?
Are the libraries provided with Ada portable across several platforms, is
there a Standard library for Ada?
How would you compare its performance to C++? (without biasing it with your
love for Ada)

Thanks in advance

Re: Suggestions to a Newbie

[Marin D. Condic]

Cagdas Ozgenc wrote:
> 1) A starter's book for a programmer with solid experience in programming
> with many other languages. Basically I do not want a book that teaches what
> recursion is etc. Also it would be better if it directly gets into practical
> applications with OO paradigm, without talking about what OO is.
> 
Bard Crawford just published a book that sounds like it would fit your
needs. Try: http://www.learnada.com/ See also: http://www.adapower.com/
for more book references. My web site has some links to other Ada
related sites as well as some code examples that may be useful to you.

> 2) A compiler for Windows NT, with a dedicated IDE. Free or commercial
> doesn't matter. Free would be better, but if the compiler and the IDE are
> developed by different people, or companies, I really do not want to go
> through the hell of configuring a generic IDE to run externally a compiler,
> and its debugger.
> 
Depends on your needs. Adapower has links to many of the compiler
vendors. Many beginners use the GNAT compiler with the AdaGide IDE. You
can download both at the FTP site. (See Adapower or my links page). 

> Also, can we say that Ada is an allround language, or is it targeted for a
> specific field?
> Are the libraries provided with Ada portable across several platforms, is
> there a Standard library for Ada?
> How would you compare its performance to C++? (without biasing it with your
> love for Ada)
> 
Ada is an excellent general-purpose programming language. It is designed
for high reliability and long-lived systems. Normally, you'd not use it
for things that are quick-and-dirty where (for example) something like a
shell scripting language would be more appropriate. For most other
things it works just fine. Check out the websites mentioned and the
others linked to from there. You'll find many people have written about
what Ada is useful for.

There are a number of libraries defined by the standard for Ada that all
compilers must adhere to for all platforms. There are some which are
optional for when a compiler is being used for a platform on which it
makes no sense. See the Ada Reference Manual (online at Adapower) to
find out what libraries are in the standard. There are also many
non-standard-quasi-standard libraries available from other sources. For
example, the Ada binding to the Win32api is pretty much an agreed upon
standard, but it isn't part of the language standard and won't work on
all platforms (obviously!) There are many libraries available from
numerous sources for specialized needs. Portability may vary with these.
If you surf the net a little or ask around, you can find lots of Ada
source code for a variety of needs.

Performance compared to C++? That depends. What do you mean by
performance? Compiler speed? Runtime speed? Development speed?
Reliability? ..... I'll assume you mean the efficiency of the language
in terms of the code it produces and answer this way: It depends. :-)
There is nothing inherent in Ada that will keep it from performing as
well or better than any other language out there. In some cases, because
of the amount of information available to the compiler, it is possible
to perform optimizations you couldn't do in languages like C++. OTOH,
the *actual* speed of code produced by one compiler versus another can
vary considerably. A good quality C++ compiler will outperform a bad
quality Ada compiler, and likewise, the other way around. Compiler
performance is not a language issue. That said, most of the
implementations I've seen have generated very good code so as to be
indistinguishable from comparable compilers for other languages in most
applications. Until you start trying to compile for embedded/realtime
systems, the difference typically is unimportant. *That* having been
said, I've used Ada in embedded/realtime systems and seen extremely fast
code produced from the language. "Performance" of Ada will not likely be
a problem for you so long as you select the right compiler for the job.

MDC
-- 
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "Take away the punchbowl just when the party gets going" 

        --  William McChesney Martin, Former Fed chairman, explaining 
            what a sound central bank must always do. 
======================================================================

Re: Suggestions to a Newbie

[Preben Randhol]

On Thu, 17 Aug 2000 16:26:47 -0400, Marin D. Condic wrote:
>for high reliability and long-lived systems. Normally, you'd not use it
>for things that are quick-and-dirty where (for example) something like a
>shell scripting language would be more appropriate. For most other
>things it works just fine. Check out the websites mentioned and the
>others linked to from there. You'll find many people have written about
>what Ada is useful for.

Hrmf, I just made a small Ada program to format text to be sent as SMS
to my celluar phone. It probably could have been done in perl, but it
took me less time to do it in Ada and it worked right away :-)

-- 
Preben Randhol - Ph. D student - http://www.pvv.org/~randhol/
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent", Isaac Asimov

Re: Suggestions to a Newbie

[Marin D. Condic]

Preben Randhol wrote:
> Hrmf, I just made a small Ada program to format text to be sent as SMS
> to my celluar phone. It probably could have been done in perl, but it
> took me less time to do it in Ada and it worked right away :-)
> 
Oh, all right. I'll confess to hacking in Ada too. I have a large
collection of tools hanging around on the disk and I'm so familiar with
all of them that I can usually pull together a quickie app to parse some
text file or fix something in a database faster in Ada than I might in
some other scripting language with which I had less familiarity.

But when I used to spend lots of time on VMS, I could slap together a
DCL job that would accomplish fairly sophisticated kinds of things much
more easily than I could hack an Ada program of similar function.
Depends on the problem space. Lots of file manipulation and OS
interaction? DCL would be easier. Of course, there was no problem
building a DCL job that could run Ada hacks in it when Ada did it
easier. :-)

Too bad VMS is fading into the background - withering in the shade cast
by the various flavors of Unix. (I'm a hard core VMS bigot!) Maybe
Compaq ought to make the source public and maybe someone could make a
Linux-like thing out of it?

MDC
-- 
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "Take away the punchbowl just when the party gets going" 

        --  William McChesney Martin, Former Fed chairman, explaining 
            what a sound central bank must always do. 
======================================================================

Re: Suggestions to a Newbie

[Tarjei T. Jensen]

Marin D. Condic wrote:
>Too bad VMS is fading into the background - withering in the shade cast
>by the various flavors of Unix. (I'm a hard core VMS bigot!) Maybe
>Compaq ought to make the source public and maybe someone could make a
>Linux-like thing out of it?


I seem to remember having read that VMS is getting a second life as a web
server platform. There is a lot of unix hackers around. Running your public web
service on something exotic like a VMS or Macintosh server gives you an added
level of security. Security through obscurity seems to work.

If I had to have a e-commerce server on the net, I would want something obscure
and difficult to hack. To me VMS fits the bill. I would probably want to write
the web server myself (in Ada ofcourse).

I propose the slogan: Annoy the hackers; VMS forever!
Feel free to substitute cracker for hacker.

Greetings,

Re: Suggestions to a Newbie

[Florian Weimer]

"Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com> writes:

> I seem to remember having read that VMS is getting a second life as
> a web server platform. There is a lot of unix hackers
> around. Running your public web service on something exotic like a
> VMS or Macintosh server gives you an added level of
> security. Security through obscurity seems to work.

I know of some German hackers (not crackers) who were donated quite an
impressive machine running (Open?)VMS.  Hackers are interested in VMS
as well because it's a bit exotic (and the guy next door doesn't have
it. ;-)

Re: Suggestions to a Newbie

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <8nk09h$srp4@news.kvaerner.com>, "Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com> writes:

> If I had to have a e-commerce server on the net, I would want something obscure
> and difficult to hack. To me VMS fits the bill. I would probably want to write
> the web server myself (in Ada ofcourse).

For commercial sales, however, the VMS Development group at Compaq
has found they need to support Apache, due to "brand recognition".
Neither the freeware OSU web server (which runs faster) nor the
Netscape web server will satisfy the customer.

Re: Suggestions to a Newbie

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <8nk09h$srp4@news.kvaerner.com>, "Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com> writes:
> 
> Marin D. Condic wrote:
>>Too bad VMS is fading into the background - withering in the shade cast
>>by the various flavors of Unix. (I'm a hard core VMS bigot!) Maybe
>>Compaq ought to make the source public and maybe someone could make a
>>Linux-like thing out of it?
> 
> 
> I seem to remember having read that VMS is getting a second life as a web
> server platform. There is a lot of unix hackers around. Running your public web
> service on something exotic like a VMS or Macintosh server gives you an added
> level of security. Security through obscurity seems to work.

In the case of the Macintosh, it is not just obscurity.
The operating system has no command line interpreter,
so the attack path of getting to the command prompt
just isn't available.

Re: Suggestions to a Newbie

[Preben Randhol]

On Thu, 17 Aug 2000 18:15:13 +0300, Cagdas Ozgenc wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I am interested in learning Ada 95. Could you please recommend:
>
>1) A starter's book for a programmer with solid experience in programming
>with many other languages. Basically I do not want a book that teaches what
>recursion is etc. Also it would be better if it directly gets into practical
>applications with OO paradigm, without talking about what OO is.

Programming in Ada 95  2. Ed by Barnes (you'll find info on it at
http://www.adapower.com)

But as you wait for the book you choose, you can quickly read
through: 

   http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~dale/ada/aln.html

>How would you compare its performance to C++? (without biasing it with your
>love for Ada)

Well as the Ada programs will crash less than your C++ programs, I'd
say it's better :-) Seriously performance is the same.

One thing you will notice you will spend some time in the beginning
disciplining yourself when you write the code. That is the compiler (or
rather the language) is far stricter so a lot of your bugs will be
caught at compile time. This is good as it will save considerable time
otherwise spent on debugging.

Enjoy!

-- 
Preben Randhol - Ph. D student - http://www.pvv.org/~randhol/
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent", Isaac Asimov

Re: Suggestions to a Newbie

[Ted Dennison]

In article <8ngv4j$ko9$1@news01.cit.cornell.edu>,
  "Cagdas Ozgenc" <co19@cornell.edu> wrote:
> I am interested in learning Ada 95. Could you please recommend:
>
> 1) A starter's book for a programmer with solid experience in
> programming with many other languages. Basically I do not want a book
> that teaches what recursion is etc. Also it would be better if it
> directly gets into practical applications with OO paradigm, without

We have about 15 different Ada books here at work. The favorite seems to
be Ada as a Second Language, by Norman H. Cohen.

> 2) A compiler for Windows NT, with a dedicated IDE. Free or commercial
> doesn't matter. Free would be better, but if the compiler and the IDE
> are developed by different people, or companies, I really do not want
> to go through the hell of configuring a generic IDE to run externally
> a compiler, and its debugger.

There a two available for no charge, one of which is also Free.

You can download ObjectAda special edition for free at www.aonix.com,
if you're willing to fill out a survey. It has a sort of junior-league
MS Visual-style IDE, and some other nice goodies. The drawback is that
its kinda old and has a package limit to how big a program it will
compile.

You can download the public ("student") release of Gnat at
ftp://cs.nyu.edu/pub/gnat/ . The latest version doesn't come with a GUI
IDE. But it is very well integrated into Emacs (which to me is better).
If you *must* have a GUI IDE, then adagide is available for download in
the same location. But emacs is really the official IDE. You can get the
latest version of emacs for Win32 platforms at
ftp://ftp.cs.washington.edu/pub/ntemacs/latest/ . Gnat is the compiler I
use for my home hobby activities.

(Note that all theese addresses are available on my homepage).


> Also, can we say that Ada is an allround language, or is it targeted
> for a specific field?

Ada is a general-purpose language, suitable for just about any activity
you can dream up.

> Are the libraries provided with Ada portable across several platforms,
> is there a Standard library for Ada?

There is a Standard Ada library, which is portable across all platforms
*and* implementations. In a pinch you can also import any C or OS
routine you need as well.

> How would you compare its performance to C++? (without biasing it with
> your love for Ada)

You can't. The theory we like to banty about here is that Ada ought to
be fater for the same amount of optimization effort, because it can
provide the compiler a lot more detailed information about what the user
is and isn't doing with their data. But any such improvement is going to
be swamped in practice by the actual implementations of the compilers in
question. Some compiler writers just put a whole lot more effort into
optimization than others. Some are great at optimizing certian things,
but may be horrible at others. Some compilers are a lot more mature
than others, and have had a lot more time to work on their optimization.
So all you can meaningfully ask is: "Is code written for compiler A
faster than equivalent code written for compiler B"? Once you ask it
this way, its pretty obvious how to find your answer.

You can find the answers to a lot of your questions at AdaPower.
http://www.adapower.com . Check it out.

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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Before you buy.

Suggestions to a Newbie

[tmoran]

>1) A starter's book for a programmer with solid experience in programming
Barnes' and Cohen's books, as mentioned elsewhere, and various others.
See www.adapower.com

>2) A compiler for Windows NT, with a dedicated IDE. Free or commercial
Look at www.adapower.com for a list of the compilers for Windows.  The
only one you can get for $0 with source code is Gnat.  You can get
either Gnat or ObjectAda (limited version) without support for $0.
There are other compilers (listed there) with various price schedules
and with various features you may find desirable or undesirable.

>Is there a Standard library for Ada?
  Yes, but it's fairly basic.

>Are the libraries provided with Ada portable across several platforms,
  Depends.  The Standard defined libraries should be.  But of course
each vendor, and lots of other folks, offers various extra stuff which
may or may not be portable.  A Legendre function routine is likely
portable (though perhaps with varying accuracy).  A multi-tasking sort
might be portable, but have very different performance on different
hardware.  A library to help make Windows programs is unlikely to work
at all on Unix.