Earlier quoted context omitted.
lol because it's not an acronym in this case, as stated
The previous poster said it could be both, not that it is both. Apparently a lot of people think it is, which is because it's such a commonplace phenomenon. That it is a person's name is orthogonal to whether it could be an acronym.
Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System
131–140 of 203 posts
Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get why this is downvoted but it is solid advice: in C you absolutely have to track ownership and lifetimes of pointers and pointees, but the compiler is free to not help you in any way. Learning rust will make you a better programmer. Thus, the recommendation is very good.
It is not solid advice to suggest a book that's not even about the language that's being asked about. There's a number of reasons why it's not solid advice, but here's a huge one: you have no context for why the person is asking. Maybe they already know Rust, and want to learn C. It comes off extremely poorly. I downvoted your parent myself, even.
Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not solid advice to suggest a book that's not even about the language that's being asked about. There's a number of reasons why it's not solid advice, but here's a huge one: you have no context for why the person is asking. Maybe they already know Rust, and want to learn C. It comes off extremely poorly. I downvoted your parent myself, even.
It's OK Steve, Jesus was also misunderstood :-).
Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System
#134I'm not sure if this is still the case, but one of the reasons I learned Ada in college is because it was used by the DOD. I'm not sure if it's still a requirement for DOD projects, but I believe it was at the time. Which would perhaps explain why Airbus chose Ada. Either that or simply the engineers who are on the project were exposed to/ used Ada during other DOD projects. Since college, I've never touched it again…
I actually remember when Ada was in development - the US Air Force decided to use Jovial in the meantime (F16 in this case). From someone who worked at Lockheed he said there were still Jovial codebases in the past couple of years. Ada was much better than Jovial but had a fairly long design time. I got out of the DoD world by the mid 80's so never came across either again.
Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System
#135Not an expert in ADA, but after playing around with it for a while, I don't know why this language doesn't get more praise. It seems to solve a lot of the memory problems Rust solves, albeit in a different way. Its first-class arrays and strong type system seem to go a long way into not having to deal with pointers often, for example. These "features" today would likely be considered part of "a better C", except that…
Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's OK Steve, Jesus was also misunderstood :-).
I would not draw that comparison. You knew it was bad behavior, hence the "haha." You're understood just fine, it's just not going to have the effect you want.
Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Proper bounds checked arrays, possible to opt out, integers with bounds: Turbo Pascal had that too.
Key word in that sentence: had. I picked up Ada essentially because it seemed to me a more actively maintained Pascal. (I've since learned that Free Pascal/Lazarus might not be as dead as it first appeared.)
Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Besides the licensing confusion 7thaccount mentions, the GPS IDE is only free for "open source GPL software"[1]. Otherwise its everybody's favorite "Request Pricing - Help us understand your development needs and get your pricing information or an evaluation". This sucked for Smalltalk, and it sucks for Ada. I stand by my statement there was no equivalent to the Turbo family for Ada. The Ada space isn't very differen…
> the GPS IDE is only free for "open source GPL software"[1] That's very academic. The GPS is available under GPL (see https://github.com/AdaCore/gps ). As long as you don't deploy GPS or link your app with it you can use it for closed-source apps as you like; it's definitely no GPL violation. > This sucked for Smalltalk Not sure why you compare it to Smalltalk; but for the latter you can use Squeak for free (under M…
No, if small commercial developers cannot use the language without paying massive fees, you might as well forget any popularity. Heck, you couldn't even use Ada for non-GPL open source programs.
Not sure why you compare it to Smalltalk
Because Smalltalk vendors have a long history of doing the same pricing that made it impractical to impossible for the little guy to use the language. There have been several threads on HN about this.
Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you! Is the FSF GNAT version ancient or pretty close to the Adacore version in terms of updates?
I'm not up to date. Last time I checked (about five years ago) the FSF GNAT was about a year behind AdaCore GPL GNAT. Maybe someone else has more recent information.
Re: Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the GPS IDE is only free for "open source GPL software"[1] That's very academic. The GPS is available under GPL (see https://github.com/AdaCore/gps ). As long as you don't deploy GPS or link your app with it you can use it for closed-source apps as you like; it's definitely no GPL violation. > This sucked for Smalltalk Not sure why you compare it to Smalltalk; but for the latter you can use Squeak for free (under M…
That's very academic. No, if small commercial developers cannot use the language without paying massive fees, you might as well forget any popularity. Heck, you couldn't even use Ada for non-GPL open source programs. Not sure why you compare it to Smalltalk Because Smalltalk vendors have a long history of doing the same pricing that made it impractical to impossible for the little guy to use the language. There have…
Have you read my answer? There is no reason why you couldn't use FSF GNAT or GPS in closed-source projects.
> Heck, you couldn't even use Ada for non-GPL open source programs.
Why not? The GPL GNAT with RLE allows you to use any licence with your application, whether closed or open-source.
> Because Smalltalk vendors have a long history of doing the same pricing that made it impractical to impossible for the little guy to use the language.
There were always free ST versions as far as I can remember. The "little guy" could e.g. use "Little Smalltalk" by Budd which appeared before 1987.