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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
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Subject: Re: How to get Ada to ?cross the chasm??
Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2018 07:58:34 -0700
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Date: 2018-04-29T07:58:34-07:00
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"Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org> writes:
> Of course, you should be able to write complex systems without a lot
> of attention, and your style should have no constraints on it at all.

The idea, of course, is to let the machine do more of the work since
it's better at mindless and repetitive tasks than humans are.  Plus, you
can work more productively by focusing your attention on your actual
problem instead of on that low level stuff.

> The biggest constraint on style is having to use those finicky control
> structures instead of just having conditional gotos

It's the other way around.  You're constrained from using HOFs and
immutable data that are simple to reason about, instead of finicky
control structures and other low-level manipulation that it's far
preferable to leave to the compiler.

I looked at the Ada solution to
https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Hamming_numbers

and the person missed the whole point of the problem, which is to use a
sane algorithm.  And yet they still around about 5x as much code as the
"classic" Haskell solution, and their program crashed from integer
overflow for n=1692.

They posted code for n=1000000 that used a bignum package, but they
didn't show the answer, and they must not have tested the code because
it never would have finished (it would have had to count up to around 5e83).