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Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

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Re: Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

#91

Post by adrian_b »

jghn wrote: post #85
YesThatTom2 wrote: post #39

Ada was also ignored because the typical compiler cost tens of thousands of dollars. No open source or free compiler existed during the decades where popular languages could be had for free. I think that is the biggest factor of all.

GNAT has existed since at least the mid-90s, and in that time period plenty of companies used non-OSS compilers. In that era, the largest blocker for Ada was it ws viewed as having a lot of overhead for things that weren't generally seen as useful (safety guarantees). The reputation was it only mattered if you were working on military stuff, etc.

True, but at that time it was already too late. C/C++ had won.

Moreover, for a very long time GNAT had been quite difficult to build, configure and coexist with other gcc-based compilers, far more difficult than building and configuring the tool chain for any other programming language. (i.e. you could fail to get a working environment, without any easy way to discover what went wrong, which never happened with any other programming language supported by gcc)

I have no idea which was the reason for this, because whichever was the reason it had nothing to do with any intrinsic property of the language.

I do not remember when it has finally become easy to use Ada with gcc, but this might have happened only a decade ago, or even more recently.

Re: Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

#92

Post by GhosT078 »

dfox wrote: post #88
mcc1ane wrote: post #78

Every time Ada is mentioned here, I start a quest - how to try it for free on Windows. And every time I fail.

Gnat Studio just works on Windows.

I have been using GNAT Studio (previously GNAT Programming Studio or GPS) on Linux for the last 15 years.

Re: Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

#94

Post by sardon »

I remember learning ADA at uni in the 90s and not loving it because of the syntax and it being slow to work with. I also remember the Arianne 5 rocket crash in the late 90s being blamed for a software bug, and the software being written in ADA. Now i understand that it was not a pure software issue, but still, all that safety did not prevent the major disaster that it was

Re: Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

#95

Post by dharmatech »

YesThatTom2 wrote: post #39

Ada was also ignored because the typical compiler cost tens of thousands of dollars. No open source or free compiler existed during the decades where popular languages could be had for free. I think that is the biggest factor of all.

The ADA compiler for OpenVMS was over $200,000 in the 1990s.

Re: Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

#96

Post by sehugg »

twoodfin wrote: post #42
YesThatTom2 wrote: post #39

Ada was also ignored because the typical compiler cost tens of thousands of dollars. No open source or free compiler existed during the decades where popular languages could be had for free. I think that is the biggest factor of all.

Ada’s failure to escape its niche is overdetermined. Given the sophistication of the language and the compiler technology of the day, there was no way Ada was going to run well on 1980’s microcomputers. Intel built the i432 “mainframe on a chip” with a bunch of Ada concepts baked into the hardware for performance, and it was still as slow as a dog. And as we now know, microcomputers later ate the world, carrying alon…

I sometimes wonder what "Turbo Ada" would have looked like, but I think it would have probably looked like later versions of Borland Pascal. Things like generics and exceptions would have taken some of the "turbo" out of the compiler and runtime -- the code generator didn't even get a non-peephole optimizer until 32-bit Delphi, it would have been too slow.

It might be nice to have Ada's tasks driven by DOS interrupts, though. I think GNAT did this.

Re: Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

#97

Post by pyjarrett »

sardon wrote: post #94

I remember learning ADA at uni in the 90s and not loving it because of the syntax and it being slow to work with. I also remember the Arianne 5 rocket crash in the late 90s being blamed for a software bug, and the software being written in ADA. Now i understand that it was not a pure software issue, but still, all that safety did not prevent the major disaster that it was

Ariane 5 became one of the most reliable rockets ever made and was used to launch the JWST.

Re: Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

#98

Post by GhosT078 »

init1 wrote: post #40
adrian_b wrote: post #23

Ada is a language that had a lot of useful features much earlier than any of the languages that are popular today, and some of those features are still missing from the languages easily available today. In the beginning Ada has been criticized mainly for 2 reasons, it was claimed that it is too complex and it was criticized for being too verbose. Today, the criticism about complexity seems naive, because many later l…

Verbosity is a feature not a bug. Programming is a human activity and thus should use human language and avoid encoded forms that require decoding to understand. The use of abbreviations should be avoided as it obsfucates the meaning and purpose of code from a reader.

I agree. I've never understood or accepted the claim that Ada is verbose. It's simply clear and expressive. If there were some alternative concise syntax for "Ada" then I would not want to use it (because it would not be Ada).

This was proposed, as a joke, some years ago: https://www.adacore.com/blog/a-modern-syntax-for-ada

This is an old but good article on the topic: https://www.embedded.com/expressive-vs-permissive-languages-... Note that SPARK has changed significantly since this was written.

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