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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 11/15/2021 1:34 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> 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.

I know about that restriction. It has been discussed before.

If they really wanted it then they would pay ACT for the commercial edition.

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

Unfortunately then most GCC dists does not include gnat.

Supposedly m2 is going to be in standard GCC dist going forward,
so maybe Modula-2 instead of Ada??

Arne