Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!nstn.ns.ca!news.cs.indiana.edu!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!sdd.hp.com!think.com!linus!linus!linus!mbunix!eachus From: eachus@largo.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy Subject: Re: Language Wars Message-ID: Date: 31 May 91 22:58:22 GMT References: <1991May28.173812.4183@colorado.edu> <1258@cbmger.UUCP> <1991May31.181153.584@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> Sender: news@linus.mitre.org (News Service) Organization: The Mitre Corp., Bedford, MA. Lines: 56 In-Reply-To: riley@theory.TC.Cornell.EDU's message of Fri, 31 May 1991 18:11:53 GMT Nntp-Posting-Host: largo.mitre.org In article <1991May31.181153.584@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> riley@theory.TC.Cornell.EDU (Daniel S. Riley) writes: >In article <1991May28.173812.4183@colorado.edu> judd@wilkinson.Colorado.EDU (Xenu Galactic-Conqueror) writes: >>. Fortran is designed for high-powered scientific applications. >>Get on a Cray sometime - You are vain and silly if you intend to >>use any other language for that purpose. Since judd did get this right elsewhere in his post, I'll just point out that many supercomputer users are stating to switch to Ada for, among other things, its support for multiple processors. But it will be a while before the compilers are as good some of the FORTRAN compilers at "intrinsics," etc. > Fortran certainly is not my favorite language, but there are > reasons besides inertia why it is still the language of choice > for heavy-duty numeric computation. Ada is catching up, but at different rates in different markets. There is probably more Ada used in Europe, and much more FORTRAN currently on the vector machines. Incidently the "correct" hello world program in Ada is: with TEXT_IO; procedure HELLO_WORLD is begin TEXT_IO.PUT_LINE(" Hello World!"); end HELLO_WORLD; Five lines using standard formatting, and it can easily be srunk to two without loss of clarity: with TEXT_IO; use TEXT_IO; procedure HELLO_WORLD is begin PUT_LINE(" Hello World!"); end; Ada has an undeserved reputation for source code bloat from people who haven't used it, or who have used it only on very small programs. A few years ago I used to figure that Pascal was smaller for programs under 1000 lines, and Ada was better above that. I soon realized that I didn't need to keep a searate language around just to save ten minutes when writing a program in an afternoon, especially since a few personal libraries kept around wiped out even that advantage. Incidently, from experience, a 100,000 line program in Ada is a 300,000 line C monstrosity (or a 1,000,000 line COBOL monster). When you get to large programs, Ada is a necessity. -- Robert I. Eachus with STANDARD_DISCLAIMER; use STANDARD_DISCLAIMER; function MESSAGE (TEXT: in CLEVER_IDEAS) return BETTER_IDEAS is...