On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 11:23:42AM +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> Patrick wrote:
>
> >I fell in love with Ada about 14 months ago. Including the
> >cardboard box, i now have 53lbs of Ada books(A few still to read),
> >I am planning on diving into Pascal in this way too and I want to
> >mix Ada and Pascal.
>
> Like a number of other people around here, I've used Modula-2
> extensively in the past. I've also done a bit of selling and
> supporting for Ada, back in the days when there weren't any full
> implementations that ran on PCs.
>
> Realistically, Ada and Modula-x are dead.
You should try telling that to Irvine Compiler Corp., Aonix, Green Hills,
Adacore, RR, IBM, and the other companies who are still developing and
selling their Ada toolchains ;-) "Reports of the death of Ada have been
greatly exaggerated!"
> Just about everybody agrees that Ada and Modula-2 were praiseworthy
> in avoiding Pascal's "dangling else" problem, and some would argue
> that Pascal implementations could usefully have a switch to allow
> that alternative syntax. But apart from that, I'd strongly caution
> against spending too much time on them except for pure
> hobby/research interest.
That's indisputably true of Modula-2. But there are still jobs in Ada and
while it's a niche if you can snag one they pay extremely well. Ada is
well supported on Linux (in particular your favorite distro, Debian, has a
very dedicated and hard-working maintainer) but is also available for any
Linux distro, and Windows. It's a top-flight GPL toolchain supporting all
the optional Annexes and there is also a gcc version derived from that.
Ada support off Linux and Windows gets very expensive. But the market is far
from dead. New standards have been approved even recently.
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