asciilifeform: http://12000.org/my_notes/ada/index.htm << linked via subj's www. potentially handy.

asciilifeform: i wonder if there is any other language, than cl and ada, in reasonably common use today, that does not presuppose 8-bit bytes.

asciilifeform: 1 of 2 . ( the other... ada. )

asciilifeform: the saddest thing about ada is that there is only one. ( only one properly-specified, multi-implementation typesafe language that can build for small (kB ram) as well as large systems . )

asciilifeform: ( shocking seekrit!11: pascal grew up and turned into ada in '83 )

asciilifeform in other noose, now has a pretty clean 'transparently mmapize arbitrary object to disk' ada thing.

asciilifeform: not unrelatedly, asciilifeform now has a working mmap glue for ada.

asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: see my ada snippets from last week, pasted here

asciilifeform: trb (the currently existing item) could quite conceivably run on entirely different type of machine, under emulation (smbx , for instance, shipped... believe -- a c compiler, in genera. along with fortran, ada..)

asciilifeform: one possible 'fix' is ada-shaped -- compiler makes up for the retardations of c machine, inserts array bounds checks, type checks, etc.

asciilifeform: incidentally the folx who designed ada, read thompson's paper. and immediately acted. which is why in ada you get 'driving stick'-style control over the compiler, the order in which it puts down routines, and data structures during 'elaboration', and can leave bread crumbs for manual binary auditor (yes) to look for when he compares (yes) binaries built on different systems for same rocket. ☟︎

asciilifeform: i got a nice hardcover of https://www.ada-ru.org/V-0.4w/index.html , for instance, made.

asciilifeform: currently i suspect that a complete btctron can fit in 10k-line of ada.

asciilifeform: as it is, if grep -i -r unchecked * returns nil, and proggy builds in my gnat -- it is kosher ada

asciilifeform: i don't bring them up together out of superficial similarity, but from fundamental one -- v rejects 'merge' as a concept; ada rejects the promiscuous pointer and cast

asciilifeform: ada in particular is 'a harsh mistress', you can sit for 3 hrs and your thing simply won't build, gcc won't eat it, and you gotta actually open the book and grasp the reason why, brute force knob-twiddling will get you 0 result. ☟︎☟︎

asciilifeform: mod6: http://ideone.com/a1ky4l << mandelbrot in ada.

asciilifeform: mod6: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Attributes << almost all of the attributes, in helpful list

asciilifeform: i can already picture naggum, might have said, 'hey whatsthematter gnatelim is not part of ada standard, nobody promised you that it'll work and not cut out beating heart from an in-use package'

asciilifeform: usually when i end up picking up entirely new system ( most recently -- ada )

asciilifeform: fuzzed it, in various ways, ada bounds checking worx like a champ in all cases

asciilifeform: have'em learn ada, etc.

asciilifeform: (specifically unlike ada, where you can explicitly specify what this is called, 'elaboration', procedures)

asciilifeform: http://www.ada-auth.org/arm.html << on this page, there are zip of plain ascii (!!) vers of the ref and rationale, also.

asciilifeform: ( the canonical standards are also on www, http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/ada12.html , download the html to disk and use like lisp folks use clhs)

asciilifeform: mod6: http://cs.fit.edu/~ryan/ada/programs << quite possibly the best www resource re subj.

asciilifeform: there is a dark heathen world of proprietary ada compilers, mostly for winblowz, but they are so rare, you will find them on no warez, anywhere.

asciilifeform: problem is: you need a working existing ada !

asciilifeform: mod6: the bulk of what takes 'getting used to' in ada is not the syntax, but the forced sanity, e.g. you get (grudgingly) a malloc, but not a free! idea being, you get to pick a memory footprint and LIVE in it

asciilifeform: ada proggy, speaks the protocol as defined by trb; but does not attempt to verify blocks, instead uses its 'horse' (trb node it rides) as an oracle

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: e.g., ada refmanual & rationale, whole talmud, is also on www... but somehow 0 rush to snatch dung

asciilifeform: diana_coman: spiffy article, good illustration of the kind of affair ada was built to prevent

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: this is actually how the heavy industrial realtime ada folx do it. fork the standard lib.

asciilifeform: pure standard ada.

asciilifeform: http://unzip-ada.sourceforge.net/za_html/index.htm << astonishingly readable literate-programming d00d. and he has a bunch of these. ☟︎☟︎

asciilifeform goes to the b00kz room to fetch 'ada 2012 rationale', to learn whether he is complete moron, or wat.

asciilifeform: but ada also introduces notion of sane (non-underflowing and non-overflowing, and in fact arbitrarily constrained) types.

asciilifeform: this comes with the territory of 'naked' register. in ada you have to explicitly ask for this horror, it is called 'modular type'. all c types are it.

asciilifeform: likewise default assumption in ada world is that there is not necessarily a heap. (safety-critical proggies typically use NO HEAP EVER)

asciilifeform: as per ada standard, in order to have a constrained type (e.g., type foo is range 0 .. 10; ) the compiler must find a X such that X is representable on the machine as a fixint, and range of X is larger than asked-for range

asciilifeform: because -- marvel of marvels, gcc has nfi how to generate bounded unsigned 64bit types in ada on x86-64.

asciilifeform: incidentally i am not seeing much uptake for the 'walking the walk' of mircea_popescu's position, so far. afaik asciilifeform is the only one currently struggling with ada, for instance.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: ada's 'modular types' come to mind

asciilifeform: ada also.

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-01-02#1595293 << would you prefer ada's 'begin foo' / 'end foo' ? ☝︎

asciilifeform: http://wotpaste.cascadianhacker.com/pastes/HQmMH/?raw=true << example in ada. < 700 ln. ☟︎

asciilifeform: (a la ada)

asciilifeform: it is quite present in, e.g., ada.

asciilifeform: (there is also pascal, but there exists , afaik, no reasonably cross-arch compiler today for it. and ada is a variation on the pascal theme anyway...)

asciilifeform: of the type-safe/bounds-safe languages, ada is the only one which fills this description.

asciilifeform: because ada per se is very, very hairy hair shirt.

asciilifeform: fwiw i am still open to suggestions re 'the better ada'

asciilifeform: ada suffers from the latter problem also