I spent far to much time with Ada (I have and I have read quite a
pile of books on this language). When I tried to write some
sample programs with GNAT using advanced features of this
language I immediately hit on bugs so ridiculous that I was
thrown off the language for good. There are no free compilers of
this language (which you could freely use to write commercial
programs, like for example games), no affordable commercial
compilers (which you could buy for ~$500). Ada as a language is
DEAD. And you certainly heard about the Ada related catastrophe
of the Ariadne rocket? So much for "safety". Ada is dead and
should not be touched with a mile pole.
On Sunday, 5 August 2012 at 13:49:18 UTC, bearophile wrote:
Paulo Pinto:
Thank you for your answer, but I think you have missed most
subtleties of my points.
I doubt Ada programmers would appreciate any other language,
given the type of high security applications Ada is used in.
I was not referring to just Ada programmers, but to programs
that people *maybe* want to write in Ada.
Programs are not classified in just two groups as "normal" and
"ultra high integrity". There is a continuum between the
quicker Perl script and the Shuttle flight control software.
Even C and C++ have to endure strict regulations to be used in
such environments, for example the Auto Industry MISRA
standard.
D already contains some rules of those subsets of C and C++,
and some of those rules are not needed in D because D has other
features that avoid their need.
D is not like MISRA C but it's generally safer than regular C.
A stricter subset of D too can be invented.
So, I think D is fit for intermediate projects where you don't
want to afford the costs of the proved ADA-SPARK subset, but
you want something a bit safer than plain full C/C++ (this is
also the main design purpose of Rust language).
If future people will appreciate to use D for such purposes,
then it's worth tuning a bit D/Phobos for their needs too.
Bye,
bearophile
