[Info-vax] Opportunity for VSI?

[gérard Calliet]

Le 19/12/2018 à 20:43, Arne Vajhøj a écrit :
> On 12/19/2018 2:39 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> On 12/19/18 2:25 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> There are two schools of thought on programming languages.
>>>
>>> There are those that prioritize the power of the language - it
>>> should be possible to express even very complex logic in a
>>> short and concise way.
>>>
>>> And there are those that prioritize simplicity of the
>>> language - it should be possible for anybody with an
>>> IQ over 90 to read and understand the code.
>>>
>>> Ada95 and Scala definitely seems to be designed
>>> by people in the first category.
>>
>> I don't know about that.  Ada w3as used as an introductory
>> language at Universities and that was back when the average
>> incoming student hadn't seen a computer more advanced than
>> a TRS-80 or Apple ][.  They had no problem grasping it and
>> by their second year were writing rather complex programs
>> with it.
> 
> Ada95 or Ada83 ?
> 
> Arne
Somethings very subtle can be used in Ada 83, 95, 2012 (2012 introduced 
the idea of contracts, first saw in Eiffel long time ago, and very 
powerfull), but I have to agree with Bill, Ada is also well structured 
and has been used on education, because, being not at all ambiguous it 
can be used to make believe students that programs have to do 
predictable actions :) , and using small simple parts of the langage is 
possible for all IQ :)

Me best lesson in programming has been a year with first part in Caml 
(functional) "doing the most rational thing" said the teacher, and the 
second part in Ada "you can translate that to simpler procedural simple 
language" said her.

The similarity between Scala and Ada, for me, and thought there are 
totally different way of programming, is that they suppose a scientific 
basis, and so it is possible to think programming more as a rational 
action than  a probalistic action.

A subset of Ada, Spark, is used as a tool in formal proofs of programs. 
Which indicates Ada is in the universe of predictable programming.

But I have to confess I do like doing tricky shortcuts in C. The 
pleasure with C is that you know only a genius will be able to 
understand the most simple of your programs :)