On 2010-08-04, Paul Rubin <no.em...@nospam.invalid> wrote: > Grant Edwards <inva...@invalid.invalid> writes: > >> Yep, I've installed Gnat a couple times with the intention of playing >> around with it, but there's pretty much zero chance I could sell it >> at the office in place of C/C++ for embedded stuff, > > I wonder what the issues are.
The issue that would prevent its use where I work is the inability to hire anybody who knows Ada. You can't hire anybody who knows C++ either, but you can hire lots of people who claim they do. [I'm not convinced that there are more than about 6 people on the planet who know C++ well enough that they should be writing real projects in it.] That said, the last time I looked the Ada spec was only something like 100 pages long, so a case could be made that it won't take long to learn. I don't know how long the C++ language spec is, but I'm betting it's closer to 1000 than 100. But I failed when I tried to get people to use Python, so I doubt I'd have any better luck with Ada. > From everything I've heard, it's a pretty good compiler. I think it's probably a very good compiler. It's the compiler users that are the issue. > It does ok against C/C++ in the Alioth shootouts. I haven't written > anything in it beyond "hello world" but I've looked at the wikibook > about it and that intro piece that I linked earlier. It's more > verbose than C, The verbosity always bugged me a little. To my eyes all the sugar gets in the way of seeing the code. Somebody should invent a language where indentation defines the blocks. > so coding in it takes more keystrokes, but it looks to me like the > general coding approach (modulo the extra keystrokes) should be > similar to that of C, Algol, and so on, and the results should be > quite a bit more reliable. Indeed. > Mozilla is fed up with C++ and seems to be working on its own language, > called Rust: > > http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4009 Great! The world needs one more computer language... -- Grant -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
