Is Ada any good at numerics, and where can I learn more about it?
First of all, a lot of people find the general Ada philosophy (modularity, strong-typing, readable syntax, rigorous definition and standardization, etc.) to be a real benefit in numerical programming, as well as in many other types of programming. But Ada –and especially Ada 95– was also designed to meet the special requirements of number-crunching applications. The following sketches out some of these features. Hopefully a little of the flavor of the Ada philosophy will get through, but the best thing you can do at present is to read the two standard reference documents, the Ada 95 Rationale and Reference Manual. Below the GNU Ada 95 compiler is referred to several times. This compiler can be obtained by anonymous FTP from cs.nyu.edu, and at mirror sites declared in the README file of directory pub/gnat.
First of all, a lot of people find the general Ada philosophy (modularity, strong-typing, readable syntax, rigorous definition and standardization, etc.) to be a real benefit in numerical programming, as well as in many other types of programming. But Ada –and especially Ada 95– was also designed to meet the special requirements of number-crunching applications. The following sketches out some of these features. Hopefully a little of the flavor of the Ada philosophy will get through, but the best thing you can do at present is to read the two standard reference documents, the Ada 95 Rationale and Reference Manual. Below the GNU Ada 95 compiler is referred to several times. This compiler can be obtained by anonymous FTP from cs.nyu.edu, and at mirror sites declared in the README file of directory pub/gnat. 1. Machine portable floating point declarations.
