Re: a new language, designed for safety !

[Peter Chapin <PChapin@vtc.vsc.edu>]

On 2014-06-11 22:46, Dan'l Miller wrote:

>>> If there was an Ada compiler for ios, would you use it?
>>
>> Probably not.
> 
> Specifically why not use Ada?  What portion(s) of Ada are detrimental to success on iOS?  Memory management?  Lack of clear mapping of the more-unusual portions of Objective-C runtime feature-set (e.g., reflection; Grand Central Dispatch) onto Ada?

I don't know much about iOS programming specifically (I have done some
Android programming) but my point is really that I'm not convinced Ada
is an ideal language for high level applications in general. To me it
feels like a low level language, similar in many ways to C, although C++
would probably be a more appropriate comparable.

Consider Ada's arrays. They are fairly primitive and close to the
machine. Compare them with, say, lists in Haskell which are fully
dynamic by default and come endowed with a powerful list comprehension
sublanguage that makes generating and manipulating lists very simple.
Ada can get the job done, of course, but it entails withing various
packages and writing explicit loops, conditional statements, etc.

Ada's design is excellent for a systems language. I much prefer using it
over C (and even C++, although modern C++ is nice too in many ways) in
systems applications. However, for "high level" applications... there
are other languages out there that I think are better.

Peter