asciilifeform: if we had irons with bounds checkers, i would not even have dug up ada.

asciilifeform: fwiw i prototype algos in cl, which later turn into ada , but this is 'harem' rather than forum

asciilifeform: ftr 1 of the many ruins that litter asciilifeform's hdds is a half-written ada ecc ( pre-ffa )

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-11-19#1873641 << entirely agrees with my pov, which is why i had the .c in udp lib ( http://www.loper-os.org/?p=2557 ) instead of five kilometres of 'let's try to parse the c struct of 17 diff cpus in ada' ☝︎

asciilifeform: i will add, thing is deliberately shaped in such a way that it could be hand-compiled to relatively uncomplicated asm, on most archs, by a clueful reader. my yet-ungenesis'd parallel attempt at this is somewhat behind the ada, but i expect will be maybe 3000 ln. total in the end.

asciilifeform: ( in earlier ada they were quite ugly )

asciilifeform: funnily enuff, an almost ~exact opposite~ of asciilifeform's experience in digging up ada ( reputation for gnarl, turns out actually simple & clean 'when used as prescribed' ) , risc-v - reputation for 'simple and clean', turns out ball o' hair

asciilifeform: tldr : yet-another nonconstanttime , notfitinhead piece of shit, valuable exhibit for kunstkammer of 'how not to ada'

asciilifeform: bvt: https://github.com/Componolit/libsparkcrypto/blob/componolit/src/shared/generic/lsc-bignum.adb << holyfuq, obfuscated ada contest !

asciilifeform: once we have a One Troo scripting language ( possibly some variant of spyked's gc-less ada lisp.. ) i'd like to write a vtron in that ( supposing nobody else beats me to it )

asciilifeform: in the particular example of udp, a coupla extra MOV's won't make a diff speedwise (vs the latency of the nic) but this sorta thing will be ugly once we start writing kernel mods in ada / moving off unix entirely

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: what exactly is an 'ada mpi' ? ( i.e. i assume it's diff from what i'm baking )

asciilifeform: if you have a 'cassette' that contains some unknown number of variably-sized gibblets, e.g. bitcoin block, yer stuck with some form of stream (either ada's, or hand-sewn replacement, tho so far i am actually happy with ada's and see no need to sew replacement)

asciilifeform recently had the pleasure of rereading Mocky's 'why ada'. turns it the walk to ada was longer/thornier than asciilifeform remembers it being

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: fwiw i've found that the ada standard serialization, with the streams, does in fact work as specified. however i have not used in battlefield, remains to be properly exercised.

asciilifeform: this kinda thing can be frustrating, but imho it helps to remember that ada is ~deliberately~ 'not a haskell', it does not try to 'think for you', but rather leans to 'must be obvious to reader what proggy does'

asciilifeform: ( cuz ada is deliberately a 1-pass parser, it does not permit gnarly interdependency between record members that can't be resolved in 1 walk )

asciilifeform: diana_coman: ' I admit I am still not 100% sure of the actual, exact representation of such a record containing itself parametrized records since my understanding is that Ada will allocated maximum space (i.e. space to fit potentially the largest structure) ' >> i dug into this when baked 'nqb'. what it does is exactly this, recursively ( for ~each~ subrecord, allocates the maximum possible size ; ditto any subrecords. ) the represen

asciilifeform: in other olds, http://dan.corlan.net/software/niliada.ada << the 'niliada' corlan was speaking of.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu do you know this fella ? http://dan.corlan.net 'Alexandru-Dan Corlan, MD, PhD' 'stochastic models of patient evolution and pharmacologic response' 'high performance computing and programming in R, Ada and CommonLisp' ☟︎

asciilifeform: type cast is the single most dangerous operation there is ( second only to pointerism, and notice how ada makes the latter extremely painful ) hence the thing forces you to 'measure 7 times, cut 1ce'

asciilifeform: there's exactly 2 ways to do it -- the above conversion mechanisms, or the stream (read nqb to see how) . cuz transmutation of data types is a specifically dangerous act, that is deliberately not made easy in ada

asciilifeform: ( very sadly, there is not a vhdl eater for ice40. but when looking over subj 2w ago, i actually came to like vhdl, it's ~exactly ada syntax. )

asciilifeform: ( what 'genericism' does in ada, is to force the compiler to rebuild a copy of the lib for erry time the exported type is invoked in the caller. at which point may as well tell user to drop the src into his, rather than link the lib, the effect is the same )

asciilifeform: http://ossasepia.com/2018/10/31/smg-comms-chapter-5-rsa-with-oaep-from-ada/#selection-155.1206-155.2305 << example of where i'dve used an ada record

asciilifeform: diana_coman: metoo, i had to breathe ada for yrs before working all the c sad out of my follicles

asciilifeform: ( c 'unions' are sad cuz c dun give you any portable knob for cementing where the bits actually go; ada's records are sane, you can specify the exact location of erry element, paddings, endianisms, bit orders )

asciilifeform: diana_coman: re: ToOctets / ToBitstream / etc -- do you know that ada has 'variant records' (similar to ye olde C 'unions' , but with typechecking ) , you could in principle use'em and avoid the conversions, for slightly cleaner proggy

asciilifeform: ada treats any statement that divides by anything other than an immediate constant ( incl. / or mod by a named constant ) as potentially div0-barfing

asciilifeform: ( using the ada ampersand notation )

asciilifeform: 'The new Ada code simply reads from a Fuckgoats that it expects to be available at a pre-set path, *already initialised*1 and ready to read from' << ha, nice

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i have a serious wtf re serpent, and neither the s.mg/classic ada, nor the orig paper, has helped me to make sense of it, and i'm suspecting that i'm thick... so here it is:

asciilifeform: mod6: goin' back to my very full ada plate

asciilifeform: vhdl is prolly worth a 2nd look, tho i currently suspect that it vs verilog aint a 'ada vs c' win, simply longer text that does same thing ( the only unit of data in fpgaism is really the bit, so 'types' dun exist )

asciilifeform: there actually exists an ada-flavoured variant, 'vdhl', but i never saw any win from it, loox rather like simply a moar verbose verilog. but! to be fair, that was 10y ago when i last dug, it was prior to asciilifeform's getting into adaism.

asciilifeform: to continue in these lulz : ada std has a 'bounded string' type, that superficially is defined as exactly how i wanted to do 'path' type earlier. but! but! if actually invoked, it -- for no logical reason afaik -- prevents the invoking package from being declared stateless ( i.e. pragma Pure ), and this propagates ad infinitum , to caller.

asciilifeform: observe that E107 is undefined cuz it doesn't shit out a E107 : Short_Integer; pragma Import (Ada, E107, wherever); .

asciilifeform: meanwhile, in gnat bugs : apparently ( and this is documented or mentioned nowhere ) : it is impossible to have a Ada.Finalization.Limited_Controlled type ANYWHERE inside a static library, unless it is generic all the way down (i.e. if the lib package is generic, any sub-packages must also be instantiated as generics ) ☟︎☟︎☟︎☟︎☟︎☟︎☟︎

asciilifeform: bvt: linux kernel is fundamentally retarded, it expects null-termed rubbish, at times, at other times, char * and length, not to mention a pile of untyped ptrs inside structs, really oughta eat ada structs , ada fixed strings, properly typed arrays, etc instead

asciilifeform: bvt: thing is, there's a non-negotiable must-have subset of posix, that ~cannot~ be implemented as pure ada. e.g. the udp structs liquishit. or , as we learned from bvt , open()