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Subject: Re: Can a Programming Language Cause Engines to be Slow?

Author: David Rasmussen

Date: 04:36:27 11/15/02

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On November 14, 2002 at 13:03:08, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>
>I happen to like Ada too.  But in terms of speed, it has no particular advantage
>or disadvantage
>over C, other than it is not nearly as popular, and the compilers might not be
>as efficient in
>optimizing since the demand is not as great.

Then we agree more or less. I just wanted to advertise a little about Ada, and
make sure that people understand that Ada isn't slow at all, and that it's a
great and very elegant language. People tend to think that Ada is slow, and has
all sorts of security measures and checkings built-in to the language itself. It
doesn't. But it very elegantly supports the implementation (i.e. the compiler)
in making these checks optionally. So in development builds you can have all
sorts of checks (much more than with the typical C or C++ implementation), and
then in release builds, when you're "sure" that everything is ok, you can turn
it off. Also, people often don't understand what kind of language Ada is, and on
what level: Ada is an imperative language with object oriented features and
parameterized types (generics), not unlike C++'s templates (which are inspired
by Ada generics). In fact, C++ is probably the language that Ada resembles the
most (or is it the other way around?). The most obvious difference is Ada's
elegant pascal-like syntax. The development of Ada is much cleaner than the
development of C and C++, and as a result it has have less design flaws, and a
more consistent development from Ada83 to Ada95 compared to C++98.

/David



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