RE: glade starting points? [About ADA]

[Franck Martin <Franck sopac org>]

On the historic side,

ADA was specifically designed for the US DoD because the US DoD found out
that no computer language is predominant (>25%) (even C is coming in many
flavors). No one cares about good programming. And no language was able to
be used safely in rocket science.

-ADA is a multi platform language (long Before Java).
-ADA is multi threaded.
-ADA is designed for completness: variables ranges are defined, and the
compiler ensure that you don't forget a sub range when you test a variable.
-ADA is multi programmer, multi project: A team of a 1000 people can work on
the same program (long before cvs).
-ADA is robust: to be certified ADA you need to pass a series of
compiler/running tests and produce exactly the same output as per
certification (even Java doesn't have that).

The problem: programmers don't like it, because you have to be a maniac to
program it (petty syntaxic details). But that's what is required when you
want to bomb Yougoslavia without too much collateral damage. 

[the first Ariane 5 blew up, because of ONE register overflow]

I don't know if my statistics are still right, but because the DoD is the
major contractor of software in the US, ADA is the computer language the
most used in the US. Even Java has 2 versions: Java from Sun, and Java from
Microsoft (so imagine how many versions of C are out there).

And to finish, ADA was developed by the French.

Franck Martin
Database Development Officer
SOPAC South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission
Fiji
E-mail: franck@sopac.org <mailto:franck@sopac.org> 
Web site: http://www.sopac.org/ <http://www.sopac.org/> 

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-----Original Message-----
From: Preben Randhol [mailto:randhol@pvv.org]
Sent: Monday, August 21, 2000 5:31 PM
To: GNOME development
Subject: Re: glade starting points? (Re: What's wrong with VDKBuilder?)



kevin lyda <kevin@suberic.net> wrote on 20/08/2000 (22:17) :
> On Sun, Aug 20, 2000 at 03:35:59PM -0400, Matthew Berg wrote:
> > On Sun, 20 Aug 2000, kevin lyda wrote:
> > > ada95?  stop the insanity!
> > Having not programmed in Ada myself, I can't really comment. But
> > hear tell
> > its not as bad as I'd think it to be. :)
> 
> i did at uni along with a host of others.  with the exception of basic
> (which to my knowledge was never taught at my school) i've never
> really
> hated or disliked a language.  but ada got in the way more often then
> others over what i consider petty syntactic detail.

Which only goes to show how ignorant _you_ are!

Ada is a far stricter language than say the petty C language.  Therefore
problems like programcrashing, buffer overflows etc. is far less than in
C and and other
do-whatever-you-feel-like-but-don't-expect-it-to-be-stable programming
languages.

There is so much crappy crashing software out there and it is about time
that there is a change.

-- 
Preben Randhol - Ph. D student - http://www.pvv.org/~randhol/
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent", Isaac Asimov

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