Re: Ada noob here! Is Ada widely used?

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Thu, 20 May 2010 19:51:19 GMT, Duke Normandin wrote:

> On 2010-05-20, Gautier write-only <gautier_niouzes@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> On May 20, 2:53�pm, Duke Normandin wrote:
>>
>>> Just curious to know if Ada is still widely used,
>>
>> AFAIK it has never been widely used (so you can forget the "still").
>> As a language designed from scratch, it came too late to challenge
>> established languages (among them, C). The first version was perhaps
>> too rich to be competitive in the nascent microcomputing world - so it
>> that sense, it was too early. But wait, we are still in 2010. Perhaps
>> people in 2050 will ask themselves why the heck these fragile
>> "#include", '}' and pointers-everywhere-paradigm were still in use in
>> 2010...
>>
>>> and in what area(s) does it excel, e.g. data processing, number crunching, graphics, etc?
>>
>> It is excellent in these areas, and probably in many others...
> 
> So it would be fair to say that Ada is truly a "general-purpose" language?

Ada was designed as an universal-purpose language to supersede other
languages (this was one of the language design goals).

Most important Ada features to me:

- An elaborated type system
- Consistently implemented OO (*)
- High level concurrency support (**)
- Portable programming support (***)
- Efficient code generation
- Defined semantics of the language constructs
- Static analysis support
- Standardized
------------------------------------------
* broken in most OOPL
** low level in other concurrent languages
*** in Ada you tell what you want from the compiler. I.e. your design is
driven by the requirements. In other languages you have to use what the
compiler offers to you, e.g.
  type Sensor range 1..100: (Ada)
  int Sensor; (C)

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de