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I used Ada on my first coding job - test scripts for Airbus engines back in the mid-90s. Nice to see they're still using Ada, though tbh I don't remember a sing

I used Ada on my first coding job - test scripts for Airbus engines back in the mid-90s. Nice to see they're still using Ada, though tbh I don't remember a single thing about the language except for you can't dynamically create objects

baldgeek 12y ago
Ada used to be basis for CS Curriculm at Cal Poly Pomona (Circa '92- '98). Ada teaches good practice. One prominent feature is that there is no implicit casting; Add a float and int, you get a compile error. It's good to know that you have to do exactly what you want and the compiler enforces this.
- henderson101 12y ago
  ADA at university - never touched it again. It was ADA 83, and the ADA 95 object extensions looked horrible. I remember seeing PL/SQL circa Oracle 8i and it looking a lot like ADA.
  - JasonFruit 12y ago
    The object extensions aren't bad; they just suffer from a combination of an unusual object model and an even more unusual use of terminology.
  - jacques_chester 12y ago
    > I remember seeing PL/SQL circa Oracle 8i and it looking a lot like ADA. Not a coincidence. The designers of PL/SQL were largely inspired by Ada's basic syntax and structure. It's not an acronym, by the way, so no need to all-caps it.
- gamegoblin 12y ago
  Haskell is similar in this sense. And Golang (IIRC, only coded a few hundred lines in it two years ago). Example from a Haskell REPL, where Haskell won't even upcast an Int (machine int) to an Integer (unbounded int, python style): Prelude> let a = 1 :: Int Prelude> let b = 2 :: Integer Prelude> a+b <interactive>:4:3: Couldn't match expected type `Int' with actual type `Integer' In the second argument of `(+)', namely `b' In the expression: a + b In an equation for `it': it = a + b
  - ScottBurson 12y ago
    > unbounded int, python style Arrrgh!! You mean "Lisp style". Lisp has had arbitrary-precision integers ("bignums") since 1971 -- long before Python was invented.
    - gamegoblin 12y ago
      Whenever I talk about Haskell I always try to make my comparisons to Java, C, or Python for maximum relatability. I think saying "unbounded int" is enough, but then people might say "what exactly do you mean by unbounded?" so I say it's about the same as a python int. Haskell itself predates python. And IBM vacuum tube machines had arbitrary precision integers in the mid 50s, and transistor based ones in the 60s ;)
      - ScottBurson 12y ago
        > Whenever I talk about Haskell I always try to make my comparisons to Java, C, or Python for maximum relatability. Okay, well, then, thank you for giving me the opportunity to educate people on a bit of history :-) > IBM vacuum tube machines had arbitrary precision integers in the mid 50s, and transistor based ones in the 60s I seriously doubt it. They may well have had variable precision, but I don't think they had unbounded precision. That is, there was always a limit such that a result over that limit would either wrap around or trap (I don't know which), but that limit could be different for different instructions. (I'll bet there was a hardware-enforced maximum limit too, on the order of 12 or 15 digits.) It wasn't until 1969 that Knuth published algorithms for arbitrary-precision arithmetic. Also consider that arbitrary precision requires heap allocation, which certainly wasn't being done in hardware in the 1950s and -60s. If you can substantiate your claim, I'll be suitably impressed, but I'm extremely skeptical.
        gamegoblin 12y ago
        I was paraphrasing from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary-precision_arithmetic#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary-precision_arithmetic#... So in the 50s they had integers with up to 2^9 - 1 (== 511) decimal digits. In the 60s, the transistor-based one could do integers as big as your memory, the largest memory offered gave you up to 60K digits.
- maxlybbert 12y ago
  I was actually a little excited when I found out that the university I went to was an Ada school. Except, it turned out to be outdated information; it was actually a C++ school when I was there, and it started the process of becoming a Java school before I left.

baldgeek 12y ago

Ada used to be basis for CS Curriculm at Cal Poly Pomona (Circa '92- '98). Ada teaches good practice. One prominent feature is that there is no implicit casting; Add a float and int, you get a compile error. It's good to know that you have to do exactly what you want and the compiler enforces this.

henderson101 12y ago
ADA at university - never touched it again. It was ADA 83, and the ADA 95 object extensions looked horrible. I remember seeing PL/SQL circa Oracle 8i and it looking a lot like ADA.
- JasonFruit 12y ago
  The object extensions aren't bad; they just suffer from a combination of an unusual object model and an even more unusual use of terminology.
- jacques_chester 12y ago
  > I remember seeing PL/SQL circa Oracle 8i and it looking a lot like ADA. Not a coincidence. The designers of PL/SQL were largely inspired by Ada's basic syntax and structure. It's not an acronym, by the way, so no need to all-caps it.
gamegoblin 12y ago
Haskell is similar in this sense. And Golang (IIRC, only coded a few hundred lines in it two years ago). Example from a Haskell REPL, where Haskell won't even upcast an Int (machine int) to an Integer (unbounded int, python style): Prelude> let a = 1 :: Int Prelude> let b = 2 :: Integer Prelude> a+b <interactive>:4:3: Couldn't match expected type `Int' with actual type `Integer' In the second argument of `(+)', namely `b' In the expression: a + b In an equation for `it': it = a + b
- ScottBurson 12y ago
  > unbounded int, python style Arrrgh!! You mean "Lisp style". Lisp has had arbitrary-precision integers ("bignums") since 1971 -- long before Python was invented.
  - gamegoblin 12y ago
    Whenever I talk about Haskell I always try to make my comparisons to Java, C, or Python for maximum relatability. I think saying "unbounded int" is enough, but then people might say "what exactly do you mean by unbounded?" so I say it's about the same as a python int. Haskell itself predates python. And IBM vacuum tube machines had arbitrary precision integers in the mid 50s, and transistor based ones in the 60s ;)
    - ScottBurson 12y ago
      > Whenever I talk about Haskell I always try to make my comparisons to Java, C, or Python for maximum relatability. Okay, well, then, thank you for giving me the opportunity to educate people on a bit of history :-) > IBM vacuum tube machines had arbitrary precision integers in the mid 50s, and transistor based ones in the 60s I seriously doubt it. They may well have had variable precision, but I don't think they had unbounded precision. That is, there was always a limit such that a result over that limit would either wrap around or trap (I don't know which), but that limit could be different for different instructions. (I'll bet there was a hardware-enforced maximum limit too, on the order of 12 or 15 digits.) It wasn't until 1969 that Knuth published algorithms for arbitrary-precision arithmetic. Also consider that arbitrary precision requires heap allocation, which certainly wasn't being done in hardware in the 1950s and -60s. If you can substantiate your claim, I'll be suitably impressed, but I'm extremely skeptical.
      - gamegoblin 12y ago
        I was paraphrasing from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary-precision_arithmetic#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary-precision_arithmetic#... So in the 50s they had integers with up to 2^9 - 1 (== 511) decimal digits. In the 60s, the transistor-based one could do integers as big as your memory, the largest memory offered gave you up to 60K digits.
maxlybbert 12y ago
I was actually a little excited when I found out that the university I went to was an Ada school. Except, it turned out to be outdated information; it was actually a C++ school when I was there, and it started the process of becoming a Java school before I left.