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ACM Queue: There’s Still Some Life Left in Ada

Well, at least according to this article.
Much as I like Ada, I find this article a bit unbalanced, so feel free to criticize it and the language, if you like.

By Ehud Lamm at 2004-11-12 19:38 | Software Engineering | other blogs | 6048 reads

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Ada

The article was typical in that it didn't really address any of the relevant issues, or compare Ada to the right languages, or in the right ways.

Personally, I feel that Ada95 is, in many respects, what C/C++ should've been, although admittedly I prefer ML and Lisp dialects for most of my current problems.

Ada is great if what you want is the ability to define the layout of low-level structures explicitly, limit the ranges of values etc...and don't care that much about the verbose syntax - Ada is certainly less annoying than Java in that respect; it's verbose, but you actually get something in return for being excruciatingly explicit.

By Ville-Pertti Keinonen at Fri, 2004-11-12 22:03 | login or register to post comments

what C/C++ should've been

In 1987 I had the opportunity to review the initial drafts defining the C++ language. It had classes, inheritance, virtual functions, and a few small improvements over C. My colleagues and I viewed Ada as huge and unwieldy in comparison. We had no idea the eventual standard could be so large.

By Scott Turner at Sat, 2004-11-13 23:34 | login or register to post comments

Ada ain't perfect

In fact there are some nasty design flaws (but less than you find in many other languages). A good way to learn about them is to check ot the additions planned for Ada 2005 (Pascal Leroy, Ada-Europe'2004). Some of the work is around the standard library, but most of the design work is about core language features, that is intended to solve limitations and obstacles found in the current language.

By Ehud Lamm at Sat, 2004-11-13 21:07 | login or register to post comments