HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: emagnuso@halcyon.com (Erik Magnuson)
Subject: Re: Ada compiler wanted!
Keywords: FSF Ada Apple
Organization: The 23:00 News and Mail Service
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1992 20:10:15 GMT

In article <1992Dec9.084239.25699@sei.cmu.edu> ae@sei.cmu.edu (Arthur Evans) writes:
>DGB4@psuvm.psu.edu asks
>    Does a NON-MPW Ada compiler exist for the Macintosh? ...
>
[existing Mac compiler stuff deleted]
>The future looks better, though.  Robert Dewar, who is part of the GNAT
>Project at NYU that is implementing Ada under GNU, told me that there
>will be a Mac port on that project.  When?  Perhaps the middle of 1993?
>That product, like all GNU products, will cost no more than media
>copying and probably be available free by FTP.
>
>At Evans

Is this really likely given the FSF antipathy to Apple? Do the GNAT
implementors feel bound by RMS request to boycott Apple and not
support GNU software on Apple?

-- 
Erik

Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
From: mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539)
Subject: Re: C++ vs. Ada -- Is Ada loosing?
Organization: Texas Instruments Inc
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 18:11:58 GMT

In <1992Dec18.141448.13862@mcc.com> srogers@teenwolf.mcc.com (Steve Rogers) writes:

>In article <16269@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:

>>Just recentrly, I posted an article to comp.lang.c in which I listed a
>>number of errors in a textbook.  The textbook is about data structures
>>in C.  The authors understand data structures very well. . . . .

>    <deleted>

>>I believe that Ada is a bigger language than C.  Both languages have "dark
>>corners".  But there seems to be a tradition of Ada compilers being picky
>>and C compilers letting it all hang out.  With all due respect to "The
>>Emperor's New Clothes", which I loved when it came out, I am now _more_
>>frightened about critical software being written in C or C++ than in Ada.
>>
>>My current impression is that Ada textbooks tend to be more accurate in
>>the claims they make about what is or is not valid Ada, and tend to have
>>a higher level view of the software process, than C books.  Is this an
>>illusion, due to my knowing C relatively better than I know Ada?
>>

>I'm not sure this is true; the Barnes Ada book has LOTS of examples that
>violate the LRM.  I think perhaps it's more of a way of teaching than
>a symptom of the particular language.  In my CS education, many instructors
>(and books) adopted a method of presenting a narrow version of the language
>as though it were the whole truth, then expanding it in steps with each
>new lesson; perhaps under the theory that this would make it easier to
>grasp the wider concepts.  

This is why I don't approve of Ada as a first language.  The language
is simply too large and powerful, and when you try to teach
restrictive subsets you wind up teaching things that are 'wrong' in
the broader scope.  C++ has this same problem, along with a problem
that it 'inherits' from C.  The biggest problem with C isn't the size
of the language (it's actually fairly small), but that so much of the
power and expressiveness of the language relies on things that
beginning students typically have a great deal of trouble with;
pointers and recursion.  When you add the somewhat arcane syntax
required for declaring complex types and all the safety of an
unshielded buzz saw, C is an even worse choice for a first language
than Ada is.

I think students would be best served by using something INTENDED for
teaching, which is relatively safe and small.  That pretty much means
Pascal.  Some schools have had good luck with LISP/SCHEME style
languages, but I'm not sure how easy they are to deal with as first
languages, either.

-- 
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
 in the real world."   -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fred.McCall@dseg.ti.com - I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
From: mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539)
Subject: Re: Lets split comp.lang.ada into multiple groups to confine flames
Organization: Texas Instruments Inc
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 23:31:44 GMT

In <EACHUS.92Dec18133934@oddjob.mitre.org> eachus@oddjob.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus) writes:


>   In article 62879@mimsy.umd.edu, alex@cs.umd.edu (Alex Blakemore) writes:
>   >make comp.lang.ada obsolete and create a small set of groups instead.
>   >
>   >  some suggestions
>   >
>   >    comp.lang.advocacy   - for the flame wars
>   >    comp.lang.programmer - for discussions of design/development Ada language issues
>   >                           (or comp.lang.technical or better name?)
>   >    comp.lang.announce   - moderated, low volume important announcements
>   >                           of meetings, products, standards, new mandates :) etc
>   >    comp.lang.misc       - catch all

>   If this is becomming a serious proposal, the names should be
>comp.lang.ada.programmer, etc.  However comp.lang.advocacy might be
>more appropriate than having a separate group for each language.  (Of
>course, as soon as this is mentioned in news.groups, the C and C++
>groups will play keep up with the Jones.)

Sounds good to me.  It would let me read the stuff I want to read
without having people in each group trying to tell me how "language X
is better than language Y", and people who WANT to do that could go to
comp.lang.advocacy.  Of course, that wouldn't stop it from happening
in the other groups, but it would at least give me someplace to tell
people who want to promote their language or back some other one to go
-- other than the obvious one, I mean.

[There seem to be fewer of these 'my language is better/your language
is crap' wars in the C/C++ groups than I've seen in the Ada group.
Not sure why that is, precisely.]

-- 
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
 in the real world."   -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fred.McCall@dseg.ti.com - I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
From: srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian)
Subject: Re: Ada on massively parallel supercomputer
Organization: The World
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1992 16:04:19 GMT

    I remember reading that Alsys was developing an Ada compiler for the
Transputer processor, and that there are a fair number of multiprocessing
transputers around (check out the guys at the Naval Postgraduate School
in Monterey, they seem to have an ongoing Transputer research effort,
though I think they use Occam.).

    Also, I remember seeing a few SBIRs along these lines of parallel Ada.
But no one keeps go track of that stuff, so it will require some searching
around.

Greg Aharonian
Source Translation & Optimization
-- 
**************************************************************************
Greg Aharonian
Source Translation & Optimiztion
P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
From: jbg@sei.cmu.edu (John Goodenough)
Subject: Extensions to Ada (was Re: Open Systems closed to Ada?)
Organization: The Software Engineering Institute
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 09:37:29 EST


In article <1992Dec14.172100.19250@mksol.dseg.ti.com>, mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539) writes:

|> And just what constitutes an 'illegitimate' extension and how do you
|> decide?  What about a compiler whose default behaviour matches the
|> standard (and passes the validation suite) but which has switches that
|> turn on and off various features.  Would you validate it or not?

The short answer is "Yes, this is a validatable compiler."  As I understand
validation policy, the complete language must be processed correctly under
some setting of switches.  This setting is noted in the validation summary
report.  But it is perfectly acceptable to have switches or pragmas that
reject programs if they use certain features of the language, and a number of
vendors take advantage of this possibility.  Typically such restrictions allow
the compiler to generate much better object code or use a run-time system that
has better timing characteristics.  One compiler vendor provided rate
monotonic scheduling support years ago using this approach.  Another vendor
provides a pragma whose effect is to remove support for 'IMAGE on enumeration
types -- in essence, if you (as the programmer) promise not to use 'IMAGE for
a particular enumeration type, the compiler won't generate the associated
run-time table.  If you should later forget your promise not to use 'IMAGE,
the compiler can legitimately refuse to compile the program.

As another form of legitimate extensions to the language, several vendors have
target-specific packages that allow programmers to take special advantage of
their operating system capabilities.  The use of such packages makes programs
less portable, but of course, is not prevented by the standard.

"Illegitimate" extensions would be extensions to the syntax that are not
rejected under some "standard" switch setting.  There is nothing in the policy
or standard that prevents a vendor from running "extended" Ada code through a
preprocessor as part of the compilation process as long as there is a way of
turning off the preprocessor so non-Ada constructs can be detected and
rejected.  In short, there is a lot more flexibility to experiment with
"validated" compilers than is generally realized and that has been taken
advantage of by vendors.

John B. Goodenough					Goodenough@sei.cmu.edu
Software Engineering Institute				412-268-6391
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
From: fjh@munta.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus James HENDERSON)
Subject: Re: FORTRAN bug(was Re: C++ vs. Ada -- Is Ada loosing?)
Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Australia
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1992 14:20:17 GMT

mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) writes:

>You make a good point. Perhaps the modern equivalent of that Fortran
>single-keystroke bug is my favorite bit of C code (and no, I don't
>want to bash C, just point out how common these flukes are):
>
>   int x;
>   ...
>   x = 1;
>   while (x <= 10);
>   { 
>      printf("%d\n", x);
>      x++;
>   }

A good compiler would give a warning that the call to printf was
unreachable code. The only compiler I have available, gcc, unfortunately
doesn't give any such warning. But the Pascal-subset compiler I wrote (as one
of the projects for a 3rd-year subject) gives the following warnings for
the equivalent Pascal code:

warning: variable 'x' is not used after assignment, so assignment has no effect
warning: 'while' statement will cause an infinite loop

>Any similar idiosyncracies in Ada? 

The difference between '<' and '>' is only a single keystroke.
More insidious perhaps is the difference between '<' and '<='.
So it can happen even in Ada. 

However I do agree that Ada syntax is less error-prone than C or Fortran.
This is not because it is verbose but rather because the Ada designers took
this issue into careful consideration. I believe that it would be quite
possible to design a syntax that was concise but that was no more error-prone
than Ada.

-- 
Fergus Henderson             fjh@munta.cs.mu.OZ.AU      
This .signature virus is a self-referential statement that is true - but 
you will only be able to consistently believe it if you copy it to your own
.signature file!
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
From: kst@telesoft.com (Keith Thompson @pulsar)
Subject: Re: Lets split comp.lang.ada into multiple groups to confine flames
Organization: TeleSoft, San Diego, CA, USA
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 23:33:19 GMT

In article <62879@mimsy.umd.edu> alex@cs.umd.edu (Alex Blakemore) writes:
> [...]
> make comp.lang.ada obsolete and create a small set of groups instead.
> [...]

Don't forget that the comp.lang.ada Usenet newsgroup is bidirectionally
gatewayed with the info-ada mailing list (info-ada@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu).
-- 
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith)  kst@telesoft.com
TeleSoft, 5959 Cornerstone Court West, San Diego, CA, 92121-9891
"Listen to me, people!  We must stick them with quills -- it's the only way!"
From: jonesm@nic.cerf.net (Matthew Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada on massively parallel supercomputer
Date: 15 Dec 1992 15:31:41 GMT
Organization: CERFnet
NNTP-Posting-Host: nic.cerf.net

In article <1992Dec14.095348.36617@uservx.plk.af.mil> zetocha@uservx.plk.af.mil writes:
%   I am in the process of developing parallelized neural network 
%algorithms using Ada.  I would like to do some testing on a Massively
%Parallel Supercomputer, but I'm having trouble locating an MP computer
%which has a parallel Ada compiler.   Does anyone know where I might  find
%such a beast to buy time off of?

Boy I'm sure everyone would like to know of such exists. You did not say
whether you want MIMD or SIMD. My understanding is that it would be very
difficult to build a validated Ada compiler for an SIMD computer 
(how to handle exceptions in a parallel for is given as an example).
Also would you want to use parallel tasking?

Let us all know what you find.

Matthew Jones
jonesm@cerf.net
From: mjl-b@minster.york.ac.uk
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada on massively parallel supercomputer
Date: 16 Dec 92 19:55:47 GMT
Reply-To: mjl-b@minster.york.ac.uk (Mathew Lodge)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of York, England

In article <SRCTRAN.92Dec15110419@world.std.com> srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) writes:
>
>    I remember reading that Alsys was developing an Ada compiler for the
>Transputer processor, and that there are a fair number of multiprocessing
>transputers around (check out the guys at the Naval Postgraduate School
>in Monterey, they seem to have an ongoing Transputer research effort,
>though I think they use Occam.).

Alsys Ada for the Transputer was launched in September 1989. There's also
AdaMap, a tool for creating distributed Ada applications, launched for the
Transputer at the end of 1991.

>Greg Aharonian
>Source Translation & Optimization

Mat

| Mathew Lodge                      | "I don't care how many times they go    |
| mjl-b@minster.york.ac.uk          |  up-tiddly-up-up. They're still gits."  |
| Langwith College, Uni of York, UK |  -- Blackadder Goes Forth               |
From: schradg@obelix.uni-muenster.de (Goetz Schrader)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Online turorial or manual
Date: 13 Dec 1992 20:50:40 +0100
Organization: Westf. Wilh.-Universitaet Muenster, Germany
NNTP-Posting-Host: obelix.uni-muenster.de


John Anderson writes:
> Does anyone know of an online version of an Ada turorial or manual that is im
> 
> mented in a way similar to  a hyertext application.  
> 
> I know the LRM text file is available by ftp, but was looking for a shareware
> 
> rorial or retrieval
> tool.

There is a program called ADA-TUTR available from
John J. Herro, Ph. D.
Software Innovations Technology
1083 Mandarin Drive NE,
Palm Bay
FL 32905-4706

for PCs. I believe it's shareware, so maybe you should try to mail Mr. Herro.
Online Hypertext Help comes along with the Meridian Ada-Compiler (very
useful: full Reference Manual !)

Hope that helps !

Goetz.
-- 
Goetz Schrader                          SchradG@Obelix.Uni-Muenster.de
WWU Muenster, Westf.              Meum est propositum in taberna mori.
Projektgruppe DaWIN                Si tacuisses philosophus manisses !
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
From: mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)
Subject: Re: FORTRAN bug(was Re: C++ vs. Ada -- Is Ada loosing?)
Organization: George Washington University
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1992 21:31:47 GMT

In article <1992Dec11.132942.24054@mksol.dseg.ti.com> mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539) writes:
>
>>For 10 points on your grade: what is printed? Why?
>>Try explaining it to a freshman.
>
>Nothing is printed.  You built an infinite loop.  This is hard to
>understand?  You made a while loop with an empty body and a condition
>that is never met because you never increment x.  Your freshmen don't
>get this?

Sure they get it. I just don't want to take my time or theirs on this
kind of silliness. Which is why I keep saying that C should be
everyone's second language and nobody's first.
>
>>Any similar idiosyncracies in Ada? 
>
>Single character ones?  Probably not, but that just indicates that Ada
>is incredibly more verbose than C.  One of the things I DISlike about
>it, by the way.
>
You're certainly entitled to your opinion. I'm not down on C. I'd
rather train my teenager on a nice, verbose, safe car and give him
the keys to the Porsche after he's proven himself on the Chevy.
Less chance he'll waste his time crashing and burning. And the 70% or
more of the freshman teachers who are going to Ada or sticking with
Pascal (only slightly less verbose than Ada) agree.

Please - no more language wars.

Mike
From: alex@cs.umd.edu (Alex Blakemore)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Lets split comp.lang.ada into multiple groups to confine flames
Date: 18 Dec 92 03:24:05 GMT
Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742

% make comp.lang.ada obsolete and create a small set of groups instead.
%   some suggestions
%     comp.lang.advocacy   - for the flame wars
%     comp.lang.programmer - for discussions of design/development Ada language issues
%                            (or comp.lang.technical or better name?)
%     comp.lang.announce   - moderated, low volume important announcements
%                            of meetings, products, standards, new mandates :) etc
%     comp.lang.misc       - catch all
 
mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539) writes:

> Uh, I think you're probably going to have some problems getting this
> past all the other language groups, since it seems to assume that
> 'comp.lang.programmer' assumes Ada.


sorry, my mistake. Of course the groups should start with
the prefix comp.lang.ada.  I didnt type what I meant.

so the names would be comp.lang.ada.advocacy etc

Is anyone familiar with the call for votes process?


-- 
---------------------------------------------------
Alex Blakemore alex@cs.umd.edu   NeXT mail accepted
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
From: pete@puffin.uucp (Pete Carah)
Subject: Re: Open Systems closed to Ada?
Organization: Pete's Unix
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1992 19:45:20 GMT

In article <1992Dec13.151515.27646@sei.cmu.edu> ae@sei.cmu.edu (Arthur Evans) writes (quotes...):
>    QRS [the pseudonym for the defense contractor, which is not
>    identified] is convinced.  It has now decided to use Ada extensively
>    because it believes the use of Ada will provide the company with a
>    competitive edge in the market place.
Or when the compiler isn't better for particular cases (e.g. device drivers
and, say, specialized display drivers for which you want to unroll large
loops, etc), one can prototype in ada and hand-convert to assembly when
the program is debugged.  Of course, assembly optimizations and the
related ada source optimizations may not exactly correspond.  However,
this may make the assembly development both faster and more reliable.
I have done this several times in 286-based systems using the Meridian
compiler (whose optimizer wouldn't handle programs as big as ours at the
time, and which wasn't as good at PARTICULAR optimizations specific to
the task as we were).  Ada's package isolation makes this easy to
manage.

Ada is certainly not a bad language; it wasn't nearly as well supported
as C for its first 5 or more years, but that is finally getting better.

I have objections to the mandate being used to force, say, 20-30 (or even
several hundred) line snobol (or awk, for example; there are related
problems in non-text situations too) programs to be developed in ada
where the result (because of lack of associative array packages, for
an example from awk) would require thousands of lines of ada to be
written.  The symbol table packages in the repository are in general
not very portable - we DID try to use several of them (in other
situations) and ran into problems with compile-time symbol-table size,
and generated-code segment size (remember this was on a 286).

If the program volume in the repository ever gets up to even
comp.sources.unix (which has been a very low-volume group lately) it
may start to be useful.  Note too that the only program from the
unix sources groups which I've had problems with on a 286 was pathalias
(for the hash table for system names).  (compress has similar problems
but since the hash table is fixed size, someone solved that problem
long ago.  The result runs even in MSDOS real-mode.)

-- Pete
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
From: fjh@munta.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus James HENDERSON)
Subject: Re: FORTRAN bug(was Re: C++ vs. Ada -- Is Ada loosing?)
Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Australia
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1992 14:34:42 GMT

obry@flash.bellcore.com (Pascal Obry) writes:

>I like Ada because you can *read* it. And this seem to be one of the most
>important thing about a language. With goods choices for the identifier, you
>can read an Ada progam like a text, you don't have to translate what you read.
>
>You write a program one time, but how many time you read it ?

When learning a foreign language, there is a critical point at which you
cease translating from the foreign tongue into your own and back again,
and start to *think* in the foreign language.

The same is true of programming languages. After a very short span of time,
you start to *think* in terms of the constructs that your programming
language offers. Once this point is reached, using symbols instead of
words makes very little difference to the readability. Indeed the more
verbose form may often be less readable. We all learn how to read
mathematical equations - would you prefer that they be spelt out using
"plus" instead of "+", etc.? If you want a language where programs read
like text, try COBOL. Personally I believe that many common programming
language constructs are better expressed symbolically.

-- 
Fergus Henderson             fjh@munta.cs.mu.OZ.AU      
This .signature virus is a self-referential statement that is true - but 
you will only be able to consistently believe it if you copy it to your own
.signature file!
Xref: sparky comp.lang.ada:3627 comp.software-eng:4890
From: gibian@talent.ljo.dec.com (Marc S. Gibian)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: DoD and NIST undermining commercial CASE industry
Date: 11 Dec 92 18:00:31 GMT
Reply-To: gibian@ljohub.enet.dec.com
Followup-To: comp.lang.ada
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation


A couple of quick comments:

1.  There is no difference between CASE tool integration and more general
"tool" integration.

2.  Digital has not been mentioned, but has a significant integration
effort.

3.  It has been a few years, but a while back I worked for a major government
contractor.  At that time, there was a US standard whose name I belive was
"CASE" (not to be confused with CASE tools).  Last I heard, there was a
revised "CASE II" that was quite close to PCTE.  This would indicate that
this is more a Atherton/ATIS vs. other "standards" discussion.

4.  What about Window's DDE/OLE?
--
Marc S. Gibian			email: gibian@talent.ljo.dec.com
Principal Software Engineer	phone: (508) 486-6598
Digital Equipment Corporation	fax:   (508) 486-6648  or (508) 486-6100
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada