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jacquesm

What were your main reasons for thinking Ada could not be implemented?

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It was a very large language, relative to others of the day, and I had no idea how to do it.

Ironically, I picked C++ to implement, having no idea that it was unimplementable :-)

(It took until the aughts for EDG to be the first to do a complete implementation of C++.)

Thanks (both for the answer, and for ZC++, my first real C++ compiler on windows after 'cfront' (on xenix iirc, but it's ages ago...), MWC before that).

My first C++ compiler was cfront and SAS.

It is difficult to think of Ada as a 'large language' compared to everything else. I'd love to see Ada and Modula-3 have a resurgence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3

What benefits would you see Modula-3 offering over the numerous other languages available today?

There wasn't anything particularly special about it when I last used it in the 1990s. It wasn't a bad language, but there wasn't anything particularly compelling about it or its implementations, either. There was nothing that really made it more useful than C++, or even Delphi and Java.

I can't add much over what wikipedia [0] says. One of the most attractive features for me was the rapid compilation times and the module system (they go hand in hand).

Modula-3 predated Java by about 10 years and I'd say the type system [1] still surpasses it. Modula-3 was nearly everything that Java ended up being, a safe performant systems language.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3

[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/courses/modules/papers/cardelli-e...

This is an especially interesting question given how much smaller and faster Pascal implementations were for DOS than C compilers. What did Ada add that was so complex (and how's it compare to the complexity that C++ added to C)?

Ada has packages, generics, exceptions, concurrency, default values, operator overloading, user defined types, fixed point, subtypes (so you can, for example, limit an integer to the range 0..100, and then the compiler has to check to see that it is used correctly everywhere), pooled memory, built in run type checking, pragmas, etc., etc.

Pascal also had subtypes, or at least Borland's did.

The standard library is robust... The language itself isnt terribly big, it does support threads though.

NYU made a free Ada compiler in the 90s, it's part of gcc now. Ada's problem wasn't only compilers, it was the culture. Hackers hate COBOL, it's still routinely used to cutdown a language ("Java is the new COBOL") yet very few have ever used it but it has that rap. Ada is a DoD specified language that was designed with real software engineering problems and science in mind, it has a bad rap because of that.

It's a different world now, the tooling alone changes the equation (at the time both Ada and pascal were seen as too verbose, begin and end were a lot more letters than braces, now our editors do that stuff for us..) being a DoD specified cousin of pascal is what hurt Ada, then there was the compiler selection... It always seems like Ada is ready to be attractive, there is a community around rust and go though.

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