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 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,93a8020cc980d113 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: What is wrong with Ada? References: <1176150704.130880.248080@l77g2000hsb.googlegroups.com> <1176169724.087077.237410@w1g2000hsg.googlegroups.com> From: Markus E Leypold Organization: N/A Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:58:45 +0200 Message-ID: User-Agent: Some cool user agent (SCUG) Cancel-Lock: sha1:FMBLGxAXxfOdckhEalL/mKnhPds= MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii NNTP-Posting-Host: 88.72.227.169 X-Trace: news.arcor-ip.de 1176216687 88.72.227.169 (10 Apr 2007 16:51:27 +0200) X-Complaints-To: abuse@arcor-ip.de Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!newsfeed00.sul.t-online.de!t-online.de!newsfeed.freenet.de!news.unit0.net!newsfeed.arcor-ip.de!news.arcor-ip.de!not-for-mail Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:14863 Date: 2007-04-10T16:58:45+02:00 List-Id: "martinbishop" writes: > On Apr 9, 8:25 pm, Brian May wrote: >> >>>>> "martinbishop" == martinbishop writes: >> >> martinbishop> I've never been scared of "non mainstream" >> martinbishop> languages, but I was wondering, what is wrong with >> martinbishop> Ada? Why don't more people use it? What do most >> martinbishop> people think of it? To me, it seems like a nice, >> martinbishop> concise, and safe language, but I haven't used it >> martinbishop> yet. >> >> This was discussed recently. >> >> Seehttp://groups.google.com.au/group/comp.lang.ada/browse_thread/thread/... >> -- >> Brian May > > Ahh, Thanks for that. > > I've seen Ada "benchmarks", and it seems the compiler is great, and > the language seems really nice (verbose, but I kind of like that over > languages like Haskell and such). I figured most people didn't use it > for business or just general popularity reasons, but I thought there > might be some hidden "bad things" or something. One "bad" thing (but that might not touch you) is availability of compilers: There is a number of plain commercial compilers, some stuff that is free as in beer (i.e. not avialable in 2 years from now) and finally GNAT. GNAT comes in 2 versions: The FSF version which has a run time with a linking exception and the AdaCore version which is either available with a GPL runtime license or a (not quite so cheap) paid license which has a linking excepetion. That means, with the AdaCore "free" version you can only build GPLed software, since the runtime is linked against the executable. It is, I think, important to point that out, since here the situation is different from what is custom with other "free" compilation systems (where the use of a certain compiler rarely affects the license under which you have to distribute your executables). Problem with the FSF version (which would have the linikng exception) is, that it is integrated in the GCC source tree now, but there are no QC'd releases with GCC, so its not always in a good shape, the efforts of various vounteers notwithstanding. Also support for compiler versions on various platforms (Windows, Linux, *BSD, VMS, ...) is varies: The Linux support is really good (esp. on Debian), but often only old or unstable versions (Windows: AFAIK you only get a old MingW version or 3.15p), or the AdaCore version is available. For VMS it has been a long time anybody has actually seen a free version. (My research might not be up to date any more, so anybody here in c.l.a. is welcome to correct me here). One further thing you might consider, is, that AdaCore recently has stripped the linking exception from a number of libraries (Florist, GtkAda, PolyOrb) which they partly developed and traditionally maintained. No community fork has happened at the time which preserved the original more liberal licenses, so at the moment a number of important libraries are only publicly available for GPL development. This again is different from what you'll find in other language communities. Most other languages (to take on example) have either no GTK binding (which often is an indication that the language has only few followers any more or is not used for user application programming) or if it exists, it is under LGPL or similar. With Ada the situation is different: GtkAda is under strict GPL and doesn't even compile with other (Windows or Linux PC) Ada compilers AFAIK. Other bindings are completely platform specific (like CLAW) and proprietary. (Again that might not be a bad thing dependend on what you intend to do with it). You'll find similar situation for a number of other libraries. There are free libraries, though, like Tash (a Ada-Tk binding) and a number of excellent data structure and container libaries. So to wrap it up: There is nothing wrong with the language per se, but dependend on what you might want to do with it, the availability of tools and libraries and the conditions to which they are available might affect you or not. Regards -- Markus