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, Insightful)
It got a lot of bad press, mostly because it originated from a request from the US DoD for a single language to do "all things". It's original MIL-STD designation was 1815 (Ada Lovelace's birth year).
Many aircraft have their flight control systems built in Ada, eg: Boeing 777, Apache Helicopter.
From memory the GPS Block II Satelites, not sure about the Block III.
The original Ada 83 compilers were pretty awful - slow and produced horrible code. But they got way better. Because the language required a "program library" to store information about the compiled units (yes, GNAT showed that it wasn't really necessary), the optimizers in the middle pass and back-end had access to more information than normal, giving scope to some very effective optimizations. I've seen generated code that was as good as the best hand coded assembly - multiple levels of inlining, removal of sub-routine pre and post amble code, delayed branch slot filling, value propogation used to remove implicit and explicit tests etc.
My biggest challenge was always the lack of support for the latest and greatest libraries, eg: X11, MOTIF and their Windows equivalents.
Re:Anybody using Ada? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me add a note for the community: yes, they are almost as bad as Apple fanbois when it comes to advocating Ada, but aside from that it's the friendliest community I've ever met on the Internet.
When I as a hobbyist, who dabbles a bit in Ada, can ask questions and get answers from professional industrial programmers with multiple large mission-critical systems to their name, and get these answers in a friendly supportive tone, I think I am justified to say that this is a nice community.
Re:Anybody using Ada? (Score:2, Insightful)
..But most products are created by small teams of programmers, have a lifetime of a few years, don't need to be anywhere as reliable..
And that, dear readers, is why I really hate what passes for programmers nowadays.
The oldest code I've wrote that I know of which is still currently in daily use is now at the 22 years old mark, was done in assembly, was only really intended to 'work' for a year at most (was done for a R&D prototype, they kept the code in for the production models.)
(And, yes, I have, for my sins, dabbled in Ada)
Re:Anybody using Ada? (Score:3, Insightful)
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
That's a shame. I was also introduced to Ada at university and, while I accept that the syntax is pedantic, it was demonstrably extremely useful. Now I just see it as another tool which I could competently apply to problems where high reliability is mandatory and distributed/concurrent algorithms are involved.