Ada 2012 Language Approved As Standard By ISO 165
hypnosec writes "The Ada Resource Association (ARA) announced that the Ada 2012 programming language has been approved and published as a standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Announcing the development, ARA and Ada-Europe said that the new version brings with it the concept of contract-based programming, Concurrency and Multicore Support, Increased Expressiveness and Container Enhancements.'"
Re:Anybody using Ada? (Score:4, Informative)
Seen it used for some logic in a gateway that converted one network medium to another (and did a bunch of other not-so-trivial things while it was at it..).
I wouldn't really have classified it as an "algorithm" language. If anything it's a logic language with a major focus on reliability (lots of strong typing and compile time error detection) and fault handling (really good run time error handling).
the only important link (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Anybody using Ada? (Score:4, Informative)
I did it at university because they thought it would teach people good programming habits. In fact it just made us hate Ada and look for ways to subvert it, like redefining "-" to add values together.
Ada is extremely pedantic. The idea is that it enforces good coding practices and prevents the kinds of subtle errors that can creep into more flexible languages like C. Supposedly some people in the aviation and space industries use it for mission critical stuff.
Re:Anybody using Ada? (Score:5, Informative)
I used it once, for a course on parallel programming.
the choice of ADA for that language by the faculty was stupid as hell - it's practically the only course in that university that uses ADA so the course becomes an ADA course rather than parallel programming course, the practice work is really trivial except for the fact that it's ada and it's a bitch to find ada information that isn't loaded with "IT'S MILITARY GRADE, YO!!!" bullshit for the first 10 pages of the text, making it a bitch to find out the simplest things about string manipulation and output.
on the other hand, ADA had such sweet parallel programming mechanisms(rendezvous etc) that you didn't have to learn much anything about parallel programming, last I heard they even dropped semaphores from the course work.
it's supposed to be really reliable though, but if every fucking book about it has to justify it's existence with that for half the book.. it just starts feeling fishy.
Re:Anybody using Ada? (Score:3, Informative)
I've used it in years past. The languages that I've used that help me produce code that just works, no matter how inclined I am to screw things up, are F#, Scala, Ada -- basically your strongly-typed languages keep me out of trouble. If you can handle the pricing and/or license issues, I would still recommend Ada as the best fit for procedural/OO programmers who want to work with tools that sustain quality. I'd expect that a very highly skilled team that wrote F#, Scala, Lisp, or Haskell could beat the dog out of most Ada teams for productivity over a few months or even a few years, but that over a period of many years, a good Ada team would be hard to bear for reliability and maintainability.
Re:Anybody using Ada? (Score:3, Informative)
FYI: It hasn't been called "ADA" for some time, simply "Ada."
Never was "ADA". It was named after Ada, Lady Lovelace, whose birthday we discussed here a few weeks ago.
Re:Anybody using Ada? (Score:0, Informative)
Yes, and from reading my message (and the link) attentively it's clear that I don't consider GPL (much less GPL v3) to be "genuinely free" software - and neither should you.
Ada compiler implementations that I'm aware of:
* GNAT [wikipedia.org] - part of GCC, restrictively licensed as (GM)GPL
* SPARK (dialect?) [wikipedia.org] - GPL v3
* A#.net [wikipedia.org] - GPL, and requires Mono (part (L)GPL v2) or MS .NET
* AdaCore [wikipedia.org] (now also encompasses AdaMagic) - proprietary
* Aonix ObjectAda [atego.com] - proprietary
* Green Heels Software [ghs.com] - proprietary
(Am I missing any?)
The short list of major languages without a fully-functional copyfree implementation includes: Perl, C#/VB.NET, Java (and Groovy / other languages that require the JVM), Delphi (and other dialects not covered by copyfree Pascal compilers, which are ancient), Erlang, and Ada. These are the languages that people should avoid - which isn't much of a loss, because all of them have already been surpassed by better-designed languages that come with no coercive demands attached.
A language without a copyfree implementation is not a free language - not just because of the severe practical restrictions of how it can be used, but for philosophical / ethical reasons as well!
--libman
Re:VHDL and ADA (Score:4, Informative)
ADA had generics long before VHDL. From the first version of Ada in fact. Stepanov and Musser wrote the Standard Template Library [wikipedia.org] for Ada in 1987 C++ Standard Template Library was first developed in ADA and then ported to C++ in the early 90s.
Just to complete the trivia, Oracle's PL/SQL has a syntax that was based somewhat on Ada.