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

[Simon Clubley]

On 2021-11-15, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
> On 11/15/2021 1:34 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2021-11-14, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>>
>>> 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.
>

Unfortunately, that's still an issue when you don't have that problem
with other languages such as C and C++.

People might want to explore other languages (including Ada) but there
are plenty of production-quality free language compilers available today.

Adacore's policy is a barrier to attracting those types of people.

> > 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??
>

Interesting. I didn't know that, thanks. I wonder if uppercase
keywords will be an optional feature instead of being mandatory ?

I wonder if you will be able to do bare metal coding with it ?

Simon.

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