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,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,103b407e8b68350b X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-01-04 00:53:41 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: kcline17@hotmail.com (Kevin Cline) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Anybody in US using ADA ? One silly idea.. Date: 4 Jan 2003 00:53:41 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Message-ID: References: <3E147D79.2070703@cogeco.ca> <4519e058.0301031434.51a0c880@posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.219.89.90 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1041670421 29329 127.0.0.1 (4 Jan 2003 08:53:41 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 4 Jan 2003 08:53:41 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:32520 Date: 2003-01-04T08:53:41+00:00 List-Id: dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison) wrote in message news:<4519e058.0301031434.51a0c880@posting.google.com>... > kcline17@hotmail.com (Kevin Cline) wrote in message news:... > > Not all the antipathy to Ada is irrational. Most of it comes > > from sad experience. Mine was trying to use Ada-83 to write Unix > > applications with a Motif UI. Regardless of any superiority in > > reliability, the scarcity of libraries and trained > > programmers makes Ada too expensive for most commercial software > > projects. > > > Odd. That's one of the few domains where Ada (even 83) is almost > ideal. With no access to subprogram types, attaching Ada-83 subprograms to widget callbacks was a real puzzle for me. At the time I was doing the work (1988) I had two buggy compilers, Verdix for Solaris and TeleSoft for Silicon Graphics. Both were expensive, validated, and neither was anywhere near the quality of the free GNU C compiler. Within a week of starting to program in Ada I found legal code that one or the other compiler rejected. With no compiler supporting both the target architectures, I was left to deal with different pragmas for calling C functions, different bindings to POSIX, different bindings to X windows, and no bindings to Xt or Motif. Neither had a useful mapping of Ada tasks to POSIX threads, but instead simulated multitasking within a single kernel thread. This was useless for all practical purposes. We were fortunate enough to have the TeleSoft GUI builder, which in an indirect way allowed us to connect Ada subprograms to widget callbacks. After many years of C programming, it was nice to work in a language where I was fairly sure that any code that compiled would probably work. But most of the problems with C were solved by the introduction of C++. After a while I was comfortable with Ada. But the insular viewpoint of the original Ada community meant that Ada just wasn't helpful for the programs I needed to write. Today, the features that Ada provides have little value compared with the features that C++ provides and Ada lacks: the STL, automatic template function instantiation, smooth integration of user-defined and primitive datatypes, and bindings to every API in existence.