Re: How to get Ada to ?cross the chasm??

[gautier_niouzes@hotmail.com]

Le dimanche 29 avril 2018 20:52:41 UTC+2, Paul Rubin a écrit :

> It may be idiosyncratic but I'm going with something like this: HLL's
> can handle large and potentially complicated data objects as easily as
> low-level languages handle machine integers.  That means you can write
> them as literals (e.g. Lisp S-expressions), create them as intermediate
> values and pass them as arguments, include them in other data, etc. and
> not have to manually manage their storage. 

You definitely missed most of Ada language, because it's standard Ada features.
You can have expressions of types of any complexity returned from a function, as parameters, as operator parameters etc.
Catch up!

> That in practice means that the language is garbage collected.
That's only relevant for languages that do most of their memory management through heap. Much garbage is randomly created and need to be collected in an asynchronous way.
Ada has more powerful ways to manage memory, and it's automatic as well.
Mostly it's through stack; the eventual heap garbage is collected in a deterministic and recursive way, invisible to the programmer, through finalization. This avoids the memory leaks/jams you meet sometimes with all-heap-allocation-and-garbage-collection.