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Hah, my perfect niche! I think that an ada-like language could make a real resurgence in embedded programming. Ada gets all the things about bare-metal right t

Hah, my perfect niche! I think that an ada-like language could make a real resurgence in embedded programming. Ada gets all the things about bare-metal right that C got wrong. However, it's held up by legacy tooling, clunky syntax, and obtuse compiler errors. Adacore has gone a long way towards alleviating those issues over the last few years, with alire and the ada_language_server. Time will see where this language takes us.

ajxs 3y ago
I completely agree. 'Design-by-committee' gets a bad rap, but Ada's designers got a lot of things right when it came to bare-metal programming. The ability to specify the in-memory representation of a type is one of my personal favourites. I don't think Ada's syntax has aged well. I wish it would get a 21st-century overhaul. I don't think that's likely though, but we can all dream. AdaCore do great work, and contribute a lot back to the open-source community.
- nrr 3y ago
  It's unclear exactly what you mean by your remark that Ada's syntax hasn't aged well, let alone what a 21st-century overhaul would look like. Is there any chance you'd expand on that? I'm curious to know your thoughts.
  - inamberclad 3y ago
    I think it's evident to most people that write Ada that the language is too English-heavy. This gets in the way of actually representing the computations. This was a design decision when the language was created, since the emphasis was put on maintainable code
    - thrawa8387336 3y ago
      Is this meant as a joke, too English-heavy?
      - lionkor 3y ago
        They likely mean the pascal-like syntax
        augustk 3y ago
        Standard Pascal has 35 reserved words compared to ANSI C 89 which has 32. Not a big difference in terms of English-heaviness. https://wiki.freepascal.org/Standard_Pascal https://wiki.freepascal.org/Standard_Pascal https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/keyword https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/keyword
        lionkor 3y ago
        Pascal uses words in a lot of places where C uses symbols
      - cjbgkagh 3y ago
        I think it’s a reference to keyword heavy in an effort to mimic natural language similar to what COBOL tried to do.
  - eschaton 3y ago
    They probably mean that they can’t get past the fact that it looks more like Algol or Pascal than C. Which is, frankly, a pretty silly argument. I’ve heard this exact argument about VHDL versus Verilog, with the former being explicitly based on Ada’s syntax and the latter being explicitly based on C’s. (Turns out though that VHDL is also strictly better than at least traditional Verilog, as it requires separate interface specifications which lead to improved modularity.) If anyone were to actually try to create “Ada: The Next Generation” I’d encourage you to just go all the way to S-expressions. Focus on the completeness and correctness of _the system_ and stop worrying about superficial complaints—or brush them off with a suggestion that they can use any syntax they want and just translate it to the standard one via tree-walking.
    - robinsonb5 3y ago
      It always makes me grin when newbies complain that VHDL is too verbose. The pain of hooking up the Xilinx AXI interconnect in about three feet of (pre-system)verilog is something I will not forget in a hurry. Having wrapped it in VHDL with nice neat record types, I can now hook it up in just a few lines of VHDL. I think of it a bit like rat's nest wiring vs. nice neat labelled cable looms.
    - ajxs 3y ago
      I like your use of "Ada: The Next Generation". I replied to your comment in GP. I'm not really too hung up on the Pascal-ish syntax. I don't think these things matter too much. If I had to design the syntax myself, I'd probably go in a different direction. That's just my own opinion though.
      - touisteur 3y ago
        Modern Ada 2012 is full of parentheses now. if-, case-expressions, expression-functions, and recently raise-expressions, quantifiers-everything, delta-aggregates, the thing looks more and more like my olden ocaml code. In a good way.
  - ajxs 3y ago
    Sure. I write a lot of Ada, and I'm a big fan of the language overall. My criticisms are minor, and it doesn't stop me enjoying the language: I feel like the 'begin', and 'end' tokens can be a bit verbose, and their verbosity doesn't add much to the language's clarity; I also dislike the fact that I need to place the same subprogram specification in both the specification and body file; I'm also on the fence about some of Ada's pointer semantics; For what it's worth, I'm also not a big fan of the particular style that the Ada language server auto-formats code into. I'll use this chance to say that I'm a fan of Ada's declarative blocks, which you could say are part of its syntax. There's a lot to like about Ada, and I'd encourage anyone interested in bare-metal programming to give it a try. Even if you don't intend to use it long-term, there's a lot of good language design ideas in Ada that can be learned from. To address a sibling comment alleging that I'd rather it look like C, that's not necessarily true. I know this is much more controversial, but I'm actually more of a fan of Python's syntax.
    - nrr 3y ago
      Hey, thanks for following up. I always felt that repeating myself to the compiler (down to `procedure subprogram is begin`…`end subprogram`) or otherwise being verbose was something of a feature in the vein of defense in depth than the syntax not aging well. It never seemed to me like it was meant to impose clarity on the code, just that you were meant to file your subprograms and types in triplicate. It's useful as a backstop against trying to do things quickly instead of doing them deliberately. At least, Ada's use of verbosity stands in stark contrast to COBOL, which does have the explicit aim to make things clear. I'm mostly of the same mind as you in re Python's (and Haskell's and F#'s) whitespace-oriented ways of doing things, at least until the real world creeps in. I've had problems with early block termination because of mixed tabs and spaces that weren't readily apparent, and the language's toolchain wasn't particularly helpful in diagnosing them, leading me to lean on external tools. (COBOL at least has the heritage of being column-oriented, so indentation being significant is less problematic there.)
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Usually many forget that their beloved C, JavaScript, Webassembly, OpenGL, Vulkan, Web, POSIX,... are equally design by committee.
  - varjag 3y ago
    The benevolent dictator cachet comes mostly from Python microcosm.
    - msla 3y ago
      And Perl before that. It's not a bad way to go, in practice, as long as it lasts.
- sttaft 3y ago
  For what it is worth, Ada was not "designed by committee" more than most languages. It was designed by a design team, and in each revision, there was a strong technical leader of the design team, with the whole design team sharing a strong design aesthetic. I doubt you could say even that about many mainstream languages these days.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ajxs 3y ago
    Thank you for clearing this up. My use of the phrase 'designed by committee' was more of a reference to a common criticism of Ada, than to any actual historical fact. Not that I was actually any the wiser, I admit. I'm a big fan of your work. Thanks for taking the time to reply.
- hashmal 3y ago
  It was designed by committee, but as long as the original author was involved he had a veto right and he used it very often, which alleviated the "committee" effect.
Galanwe 3y ago
> Ada gets all the things about bare-metal right that C got wrong I'm curious, never had a look at Ada, can you elaborate?
- MarcusE1W 3y ago
  I think it mostly refers to the build in functions in Ada for Bit fiddeling. You can represent registers and bitmaps in Ada data structures and use relatively simple to understand functions on them instead. https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-embedded-sys-prog/chapters/low_level_programming.html#specifying-representation https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-embedded-sys-prog...
  - glacia01 3y ago
    There are a lot of aspects where Ada is better than C. Just a few things that came to mind: General lack of dumb C stuff like switch fallthrough, null terminated strings (Arrays in Ada are passed with fat pointers), undefined behavior, no need for memcpy, no preprocessor bullshit etc. Ada is more like C++ in functionality so it has Generics, Tasks (Threads), Exceptions, Packages, Strong types, Design by contract etc (All much much saner than C++ stuff) Despite all of the features it's very embedded friendly. Language allows you to disable features you dont wont with Restrictions Pragma (Very long list of restrictions you can apply: https://docs.adacore.com/gnat_rm-docs/html/gnat_rm/gnat_rm/standard_and_implementation_defined_restrictions.html https://docs.adacore.com/gnat_rm-docs/html/gnat_rm/gnat_rm/s...). You can also fairly easily change runtimes: https://docs.adacore.com/gnat_ugx-docs/html/gnat_ugx/gnat_ugx/gnat_runtimes.html https://docs.adacore.com/gnat_ugx-docs/html/gnat_ugx/gnat_ug....
    - Galanwe 3y ago
      I know berating C is trendy, but it feels a bit gratuitous and uncalled for in your comment... > Ada is better than C > lack of dumb C stuff Back to your comment, strong types and generics look super nice for embedded. Not sure I would like fat pointers, exceptions and threads in my embedded code though.

ajxs 3y ago

I completely agree. 'Design-by-committee' gets a bad rap, but Ada's designers got a lot of things right when it came to bare-metal programming. The ability to specify the in-memory representation of a type is one of my personal favourites. I don't think Ada's syntax has aged well. I wish it would get a 21st-century overhaul. I don't think that's likely though, but we can all dream. AdaCore do great work, and contribute a lot back to the open-source community.

nrr 3y ago
It's unclear exactly what you mean by your remark that Ada's syntax hasn't aged well, let alone what a 21st-century overhaul would look like. Is there any chance you'd expand on that? I'm curious to know your thoughts.
- inamberclad 3y ago
  I think it's evident to most people that write Ada that the language is too English-heavy. This gets in the way of actually representing the computations. This was a design decision when the language was created, since the emphasis was put on maintainable code
  - thrawa8387336 3y ago
    Is this meant as a joke, too English-heavy?
    - lionkor 3y ago
      They likely mean the pascal-like syntax
      - augustk 3y ago
        Standard Pascal has 35 reserved words compared to ANSI C 89 which has 32. Not a big difference in terms of English-heaviness. https://wiki.freepascal.org/Standard_Pascal https://wiki.freepascal.org/Standard_Pascal https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/keyword https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/keyword
        lionkor 3y ago
        Pascal uses words in a lot of places where C uses symbols
    - cjbgkagh 3y ago
      I think it’s a reference to keyword heavy in an effort to mimic natural language similar to what COBOL tried to do.
- eschaton 3y ago
  They probably mean that they can’t get past the fact that it looks more like Algol or Pascal than C. Which is, frankly, a pretty silly argument. I’ve heard this exact argument about VHDL versus Verilog, with the former being explicitly based on Ada’s syntax and the latter being explicitly based on C’s. (Turns out though that VHDL is also strictly better than at least traditional Verilog, as it requires separate interface specifications which lead to improved modularity.) If anyone were to actually try to create “Ada: The Next Generation” I’d encourage you to just go all the way to S-expressions. Focus on the completeness and correctness of _the system_ and stop worrying about superficial complaints—or brush them off with a suggestion that they can use any syntax they want and just translate it to the standard one via tree-walking.
  - robinsonb5 3y ago
    It always makes me grin when newbies complain that VHDL is too verbose. The pain of hooking up the Xilinx AXI interconnect in about three feet of (pre-system)verilog is something I will not forget in a hurry. Having wrapped it in VHDL with nice neat record types, I can now hook it up in just a few lines of VHDL. I think of it a bit like rat's nest wiring vs. nice neat labelled cable looms.
  - ajxs 3y ago
    I like your use of "Ada: The Next Generation". I replied to your comment in GP. I'm not really too hung up on the Pascal-ish syntax. I don't think these things matter too much. If I had to design the syntax myself, I'd probably go in a different direction. That's just my own opinion though.
    - touisteur 3y ago
      Modern Ada 2012 is full of parentheses now. if-, case-expressions, expression-functions, and recently raise-expressions, quantifiers-everything, delta-aggregates, the thing looks more and more like my olden ocaml code. In a good way.
- ajxs 3y ago
  Sure. I write a lot of Ada, and I'm a big fan of the language overall. My criticisms are minor, and it doesn't stop me enjoying the language: I feel like the 'begin', and 'end' tokens can be a bit verbose, and their verbosity doesn't add much to the language's clarity; I also dislike the fact that I need to place the same subprogram specification in both the specification and body file; I'm also on the fence about some of Ada's pointer semantics; For what it's worth, I'm also not a big fan of the particular style that the Ada language server auto-formats code into. I'll use this chance to say that I'm a fan of Ada's declarative blocks, which you could say are part of its syntax. There's a lot to like about Ada, and I'd encourage anyone interested in bare-metal programming to give it a try. Even if you don't intend to use it long-term, there's a lot of good language design ideas in Ada that can be learned from. To address a sibling comment alleging that I'd rather it look like C, that's not necessarily true. I know this is much more controversial, but I'm actually more of a fan of Python's syntax.
  - nrr 3y ago
    Hey, thanks for following up. I always felt that repeating myself to the compiler (down to `procedure subprogram is begin`…`end subprogram`) or otherwise being verbose was something of a feature in the vein of defense in depth than the syntax not aging well. It never seemed to me like it was meant to impose clarity on the code, just that you were meant to file your subprograms and types in triplicate. It's useful as a backstop against trying to do things quickly instead of doing them deliberately. At least, Ada's use of verbosity stands in stark contrast to COBOL, which does have the explicit aim to make things clear. I'm mostly of the same mind as you in re Python's (and Haskell's and F#'s) whitespace-oriented ways of doing things, at least until the real world creeps in. I've had problems with early block termination because of mixed tabs and spaces that weren't readily apparent, and the language's toolchain wasn't particularly helpful in diagnosing them, leading me to lean on external tools. (COBOL at least has the heritage of being column-oriented, so indentation being significant is less problematic there.)
pjmlp 3y ago
Usually many forget that their beloved C, JavaScript, Webassembly, OpenGL, Vulkan, Web, POSIX,... are equally design by committee.
- varjag 3y ago
  The benevolent dictator cachet comes mostly from Python microcosm.
  - msla 3y ago
    And Perl before that. It's not a bad way to go, in practice, as long as it lasts.
sttaft 3y ago
For what it is worth, Ada was not "designed by committee" more than most languages. It was designed by a design team, and in each revision, there was a strong technical leader of the design team, with the whole design team sharing a strong design aesthetic. I doubt you could say even that about many mainstream languages these days.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ajxs 3y ago
  Thank you for clearing this up. My use of the phrase 'designed by committee' was more of a reference to a common criticism of Ada, than to any actual historical fact. Not that I was actually any the wiser, I admit. I'm a big fan of your work. Thanks for taking the time to reply.
hashmal 3y ago
It was designed by committee, but as long as the original author was involved he had a veto right and he used it very often, which alleviated the "committee" effect.

Galanwe 3y ago

> Ada gets all the things about bare-metal right that C got wrong I'm curious, never had a look at Ada, can you elaborate?

MarcusE1W 3y ago
I think it mostly refers to the build in functions in Ada for Bit fiddeling. You can represent registers and bitmaps in Ada data structures and use relatively simple to understand functions on them instead. https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-embedded-sys-prog/chapters/low_level_programming.html#specifying-representation https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-embedded-sys-prog...
- glacia01 3y ago
  There are a lot of aspects where Ada is better than C. Just a few things that came to mind: General lack of dumb C stuff like switch fallthrough, null terminated strings (Arrays in Ada are passed with fat pointers), undefined behavior, no need for memcpy, no preprocessor bullshit etc. Ada is more like C++ in functionality so it has Generics, Tasks (Threads), Exceptions, Packages, Strong types, Design by contract etc (All much much saner than C++ stuff) Despite all of the features it's very embedded friendly. Language allows you to disable features you dont wont with Restrictions Pragma (Very long list of restrictions you can apply: https://docs.adacore.com/gnat_rm-docs/html/gnat_rm/gnat_rm/standard_and_implementation_defined_restrictions.html https://docs.adacore.com/gnat_rm-docs/html/gnat_rm/gnat_rm/s...). You can also fairly easily change runtimes: https://docs.adacore.com/gnat_ugx-docs/html/gnat_ugx/gnat_ugx/gnat_runtimes.html https://docs.adacore.com/gnat_ugx-docs/html/gnat_ugx/gnat_ug....
  - Galanwe 3y ago
    I know berating C is trendy, but it feels a bit gratuitous and uncalled for in your comment... > Ada is better than C > lack of dumb C stuff Back to your comment, strong types and generics look super nice for embedded. Not sure I would like fat pointers, exceptions and threads in my embedded code though.