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Old 3rd March 2015
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Oko View Post
Could you please explain it a bit? I personally always great deal of interest in strongly typed languages.
Ada is the result of an effort to standardize the programming language used for all DoD (Department of Defense) projects back in the 1970's. With very large-scale goals, Ada compilers were huge, & required official validation -- meaning that they could not be officially be called Ada compilers without passing an official battery of tests. The intent was that Ada code successfully compiled on one validated compiler should compile & run with the same behavior on any other platform using an equally validated compiler.

However, these goals were not completely realized. The defense industry didn't readily accept Ada, & while there were a number of projects successfully using the language, use of other languages perpetuated -- partially because Ada compilers, having to be validly support all aspects of the language specification were large -- impractically so for nominal hardware platforms.

Secondly, Ada was intended for programming in the large. While Ada sports many of the features found in other languages today, it wasn't fully object-oriented (using today's accepted definition...) until Ada95. While many might consider this of marginal importance, it put Ada behind other popular languages at the time.

Not speaking for the OpenBSD community, but in my opinion, the overhead of compiler validation & compiler size lessened the attractiveness of the language in comparison to what could be found in other readily available alternatives.

Otherwise, Ada is not a bad language; it has some interesting checks. It still fills the niche of a number of projects which are usually government related.

More information can be found on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_%28...ng_language%29

Last edited by ocicat; 3rd March 2015 at 11:28 AM. Reason: correct spelling
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