Re: NOACE- End of the road for Ada?

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Alexander E. Kopilovich wrote:
> 
> Anyway, it seems curious enough, and probably I'll take a look at that
> Simulink. Therefore, if you know some good review of Simulink then please
> let me know.
> 
You might look for The Mathworks website http://www.mathworks.com/ to 
see if they have any examples or tutorials that might help you get a 
feel for the tools they have. Other than googling up "Simulink" I don't 
know of any specific review articles that might help you there.

(Note that you'll find the company I work for on this website 
http://www.mathworks.com/products/connections/company_name.html but I am 
not here representing Belcan or The Mathworks in any way.)

> 
> I wouldn't call that fantastic - it is just good enough for developing
> computational software. But mathematics isn't just numerical computation,
> it involves more advanced thinking (even in a case when the final aim is
> a computation), and therefore it needs more flexibility than Ada provides.
> Ada's degree of flexibility is perhaps exactly right for the purposes of Ada,
> but it is isn't very good for mathematics. Perhaps that is difference between
> "mathematics" and "math"? -:)
> 
I guess it depends on what you're trying to do. If you just want to 
solve a math problem (2 + 2 = ?) then most people don't go write a 
program - they get out a calculator. If your math problems are 
sufficiently complex, people go to what I would consider essentially a 
really complicated calculator - a stats package or a similar 
math-oriented thing like Matlab, etc.

If you have one specific problem that you are solving over and over 
again in your work, I could see that you might not want to go writing an 
Ada program and something like APL (or whatever) might be better for 
reasons of flexibility, notation, I/O, etc.

But if I'm writing software that does some job and that it has a 
significant mathematical component to it (such as say missile launch 
control software that must deal with all sorts of navigation & physics 
things) then Ada is a perfectly wonderful language. I'd like to see it 
have more (semi)standard math libraries for such applications, but at 
least when you need to get into math, there are really nice facilities 
for doing that.


MDC

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Marin David Condic
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My project is: http://www.jsf.mil/NSFrames.htm

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