Ada Short Topics

[Ted Holden]

                        Ada Short Topics
 
          Excerpted from recent comp.lang.ada articles
 
 
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Speed/Reliability:
 
 
 
 
>From Lou Glassy, montana.edu:
 
>Do any validated Ada interpreters written in C exist?   Any PD ones obtainable
>from an anon. ftp site?
 
Assuming Ada was anywhere near what it's MANDATED to be, or what Bill Wolfe
and company claim it is, why would you want an Ada interpreter written in C
rather than in Ada??
 
> ... and while the
>performance of this specific implementation did not impress me
>(compilation speed of ~140 lines/min., on a 12-Mhz 80286 w/ 80287 &
>1 meg RAM, 30 Meg 28-ms hard disk), ...
 
Ah-so... the old problem again.  I see.
 
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Arrogance:
 
Paul Snively:
>We all know C programmers whose
>machismo is thus huffed and puffed up (another of my personal opinions is 
>that the per capita arrogance of C programmers far outweighs the per 
>capita arrogance of any other language-aficionado group).
 
Bob Munck:
>We've all run into "FORTRAN/Ada" or "JOVIAL/Ada" in which FORTRAN or
>JOVIAL programmers forced to use Ada continue to write their "native
>language" but using the Ada equivalent and syntax.  It's usually
>worth the derision we give it.
 
Clement Pellerin:
>I'd be surprised if you could discipline a C programmer in such a short
>amount of time.
 
Bill Wolfe:
> It appears that there is a real need to publicize software engineering
> concepts throughout the C community, both directly through software
> engineering education and indirectly through a redesign of the C language
> to provide greater support for the software engineering process.  If
> these steps are taken, it will hopefully be possible to avoid any further
> destruction of the public's confidence in software reliability.  If not,
> government regulation of the field will probably soon become inevitable.
 
C programmers really have very little to fear with this one.  Whatever
government system the Wolfe man has in mind to sic on them will no doubt be
programmed in Ada...
 
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Ways to Make Ada worse than it already is (and, brother, that's HARD)
 
Poster's name mercifully withheld:
>There is a third option that bears looking into:  Write the thing
>in C and then run the whole mess through an ada translator.  When
>the translated stuff is verified, throw away the C.
 
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Reasons why Ada is better than C
 
 
>From several posters (paraphrased):
>"There's something basically wrong with the use of 'break' statements
>after the various choices in a C switch...:"
 
No problem.  Just spend the $150 on a copy of Zortech or somebody's C++
and use late binding INSTEAD of switches.  Of course, you can't do that
with Ada, because Ada isn't an object oriented language and lacks
inheritance and late binding.  Look forward to Ada-10x in about 20 years
(Ada-9x won't have it either).
 
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Exercise in Logic
 
 
>From another poster whose name I am, mercifully, withholding:
>"C is wrong for the world because a spaceship once fucked up due to a
>'Do i=1.50 .....' type statement in a FORTRAN program"
 
Aside from showing a lack of basic reasoning ability on the author's
part, there are two problems with this one:
 
        1.  The C equivalent ('for(i=0;i<5.i++') would be caught
        instantly, at least by Turbo C or any reasonable DOS C compiler,
        and I assume UNIX C compilers will all soon function similarly,
        and the cursor brought immediately back to the error in
        question.
 
        2.  Man doesn't belong in outer space.  If Mars or Venus were
        made of diamonds, you couldn't bring them back and do aught but
        lose money.
 
 
Ted Holden
HTE