Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping language)

From: Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen (ole-hjalmar.kristensen_at_substitute_employer_here.com)
Date: 02/12/04 

Date: 12 Feb 2004 16:37:00 +0100

Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com> writes:

> Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen wrote:
> >
> > Yes, but there are some caveats. Ada insists on getting floating point
> > arithmetic "right", so it will typically do it differently than C,
> > even though the Ada and C programs superficially look the same. For
>
>
> Well, I *did* say that only if you had similarly coded examples could
> you hope to do any comparison. Not that you couldn't do a comparison
> and see a difference. ;-)
>
> Secondly, one needs to insist that some code under evaluation must
> produce a *correct* result. If a C coded example computes the wrong
> answer at twice the speed of a similar Ada example that gets the
> answer right, is it even worth discussing?
>

It could well be. In the case of an interactive raytracer, minor
numerical errors does not really matter if you can get the results at
twice the speed. I imagine you can find other applications with
similar characteristics. But in general, I agree that for the
majority of applications the difference in speed between languages and
compilers is nothing to worry about.

<snip> 

-- 
   C++: The power, elegance and simplicity of a hand grenade.

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