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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

#231

Post by pjmlp »

sehugg wrote: post #96
twoodfin wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ada did not took off during the glory MS-DOS/Windows 3.x Borland days exactly because of Turbo Pascal.

Note that the Martin Odersky of Scala fame was one of the main developers of Turbo Modula-2, that Borland killed shortly thereafter. They were also rather quick to get rid of Turbo Basic (which I had quite some fun with).

With Turbo Pascal absorving the Object Pascal ideas from Apple, and some of the key features from Modula-2, there was not much left from Ada 83 that was relevant for MS-DOS programmers.

However nowadays between FreePascal, Delphi, and Ada, I would probably pick Ada, given its industry role, and besides Ada Core, there are actually other six vendors still in business.

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

#232

Post by pjmlp »

brabel wrote: post #200
phicoh wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that is even more so with Rust and Rust got popular in a very short amount of time.

I think this was a genuine generational change. I am pretty sure Rust would never have become popular 20 years earlier because the priorities back then were so different (that was the era of languages like Ruby and Pearl where conciseness and low verbosity were the most valued aspects).

As Gen-X, in the Usenet flamewars, the C and C++ folks used to call Pascal/Modula-2/Ada advocates as straightjacket programming, whereas they would be called cowboy programmers.

Ironically the author of Fil-C calls classical C, YOLO-C. :)

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

#233

Post by pjmlp »

phicoh wrote: post #214
jordanb wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Ada came out a lot of programmers couldn't even touch type. You're right there's a generational change and a lot of of the Ada stuff won: * strong typing * lots of annotations * keywords over syntax, support for long variable and token names * object focus (Ada 83 had some limitations on inheritance so it wasn't OO strictly speaking) * exceptions * large standard library These things were controversial in the 19…

I think that is not correct. One of the big differences between K&R C and C89 is the introduction of function prototypes. Strong typing was certainly considered positive for compiled languages. Of course C is a lot less strict than Ada. If we compare the Rust subset that has similar functionality as C then there is not much difference. You get 'fn'. The is 'let' but Rust often leaves out the type, so 'int x = 42;' be…

Function prototypes were actually taken from the C++ ISO process, back into C, originally.

Back when I learnt C, I think you could go beyond 8 or 12 characters in the symbol tables of compilers like Small-C.

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

#234

Post by HackerThemAll »

tomekw wrote: post #53

Ada is underrated. I am spending lots of my time writing tons of open source software in Ada, mostly for myself, though.

I say the same about FreePascal, but not just for myself. I have deployed some CLI solutions that needed extreme Windows compatibility, from 95 through 98, NT, 2000, XP, ... until the very latest 11 / Server 2025. Only FreePascal compiler provided that easily.

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

#235

Post by HackerThemAll »

init1 wrote: post #77
zozbot234 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust has a complex semantics , not a complicated syntax. The syntax was explicitly chosen to be quite C/C++ like while streamlining some aspects of it (e.g. the terrible type-ascription syntax, replaced with `let name: type`).

In my opinion it has both complicated and terrible syntax that it inherited and extended from c++ and complicated semantics.

ditto.

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

#236

Post by HackerThemAll »

adrian_b wrote: post #46
init1 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The programming community is strongly divided between those who believe that verbosity is a feature and not a bug and those who believe that verbosity is a bug and not a feature. A reconciliation between these 2 camps appears impossible. Therefore I think that the ideal programming language should admit 2 equivalent representations, to satisfy both kinds of people. The pro-verbose camp argues that they cannot remembe…

This opens a possibility for a middle ground. A language which is not-too-verbose, and doesn't have too many symbols would perhaps reconcile some of them.

As for storing sources as AST, that would effectively make them unreadable for most programmers. Or maybe it would basically turn every language into LISP.

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

#237

Post by HackerThemAll »

microtherion wrote: post #70
Raphael_Amiard wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Today, the criticism about complexity seems naive, because many later languages have become much more complex than Ada I don’t think you really understand what you’re saying here. I have worked on an ada compiler for the best part of a decade. It’s one of the most complex languages there is, up there with C++ and C#, and probably rust

I imagine Swift is also a very difficult language to compile.

and Julia

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

#238

Post by cestith »

jordanb wrote: post #213
cestith wrote: post #156

I like Ada. I can’t believe this whole discussion about how types are handled missed the entire ML family of languages. ML, Standard ML, Concurrent ML, Caml, OCaml, and more have structural types, supported and enforced by the compiler. Ada has one of the same primary issues as PL/I, PHP, and Perl. As much as one might like it, it’s a huge language with loads of syntax and semantics baked into the core language. The…

Ada isn't a huge language by modern standards. I would say that it's smaller than modern Python and considerably smaller than modern C++. It's also relatively syntax-free preferring keywords and standard library. Ada came "fully specified" in an era when languages were either not formally specified or were much smaller. C wasn't formally specified, for instance, until 1989 (six years after Ada) and the spec was spars…

True enough, but nobody ports Python as a first systems language to a new platform. C is ubiquitous because it tends to be the first or second language on a newly designed system after the assembler. Every once in a while Forth comes before C, but that’s pretty rare.

C won by being powerful but tiny, and making it easier to make a compliant compiler.

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

#239

Post by a96 »

adrian_b wrote: post #54
timschmidt wrote: post #5

It'd be a neat trick to have a single unified language which could bridge the gap between software and hardware description languages.

The hardware description languages, even if they have a single language specification, are divided into 2 distinct subsets, one used for synthesis, i.e. for hardware design, and one used for simulation, i.e. for hardware verification. The subset required for hardware synthesis/design, cannot be unified completely with a programming language, because it needs a different semantics, though the syntax can be made somewh…

I remembered being vaguely amused learning VHDL how familiar it felt because I'd learned some Ada long ago. But yes, it's not a deep connection. I don't know if there would be much to be gained from bringing them together.
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