Am 03.05.2012 16:04, schrieb bearophile:
Ada shares many purposes with D: correctness from the language design
too, mostly imperative, native compilation, efficiency of the binary,
closeness to the metal (even more, because not requiring a GC, it's
probably usable in more situations), generic programming, OOP, strong
static typing, and both languages share many small features (like array
slicing syntax, and so on).
Coding in Ada is a bit boring, because you have to specify every small
detail and to write a lot, but for certain programming tasks, like code
that can't have too many bugs, it's maybe the best language. As Ada
vendors say, if your life depends on a program, you often prefer that
code to be written in good Ada instead of good C. Even if writing Ada is
slower than writing C or C++, you save some time later debugging less.
Today for certain tasks Haskell seems to produce reliable code, but it
uses a GC and it's lazy, so it's quite less strict compared to Ada.
I am quite found of Ada, even if it means writting a bit more than C or
C++, IDEs can help here. When coding in Java or .NET, the IDE writes
most of the stuff already for me.
The company developing the open source Ada compiler GNAT, had the main
talk in this years FOSDEM.
Ada still suffers from the expensive compilers it had on the early
years, but thanks to the increase in security concern in software,
actually it seems to be picking up users in Europe, for projects where
human lifes are at risk.
But D would, of course, be an easier upgrade path for C or C++ developers.
--
Paulo
