[Info-vax] Safer programming languages (and walking :-) ), was: Re: 8-bit characters

[Simon Clubley]

On 2021-11-14, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
> On 11/14/2021 6:43 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> On 11/14/21 5:05 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> There is a move towards more safe languages for systems programming.
>>>
>>> The current fashion, Rust, has horrible syntax, and I have no confidence
>>> that code written in it today will still compile on the Rust compilers
>>> of 5 to 10 years from now, but its use is being driven by the desire
>>> for using safer languages.
>>>
>>> When Rust falls out of fashion, it would be nice if whatever follows
>>> Rust would address both of those problems.
>> 
>> I thought this is the problem Ada was created to fix?  :-)
>
> It was.
>
> But Ada did fall out of fashion.
>
> There are probably many explanations for that, but my guess
> is that the complexity of the language turned out to be a
> problem.
>

There's also the problem that the Ada compiler situation overall is not
good and that Adacore's Community Edition version of GNAT is pure GPL
with no runtime exception. See https://www.adacore.com/community for
details.

There's still the FSF distribution of GNAT (at least for the targets
it supports) however.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.