[J3] [EXTERNAL] Re: Comments on 23-146

[Jeff Hammond]

> why learning from Ada is a higher priority

Ada has a lot more history with parallel execution than Fortran/C++/etc have. Learning from their mistakes and subsequent corrections would be a fine thing to do.

Are you referring specifically to the temporal duration of ISO language standardization efforts related to parallelism?

I don’t claim to be an expert in many things, but parallel execution is one of them, and I’ve spent most of the past 20 years completely devoted to this topic in one form or another, and I am speechless at the suggestion that Ada as a language ecosystem has more history with parallelism than Fortran, C or C++.

Perhaps their long experience with parallel programming and tasking in particular is inapplicable to the particular Fortran use cases, but dismissing it outright because it’s not a fashionable language any more is not an obviously-wise move.

The only citation Van has provided is a book that will cost me around €100 (https://www.cambridge.org/fi/academic/subjects/computer-science/programming-languages-and-applied-logic/concurrent-and-real-time-programming-ada), which I don’t intend to buy at this point.

When I look for more recent topical references, e.g. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/249100.249112 (attached), I see evidence that Ada 83 decisions were made without consideration of parallel architectures, as indicated by the following quote from a 1988 paper:

"Though Ada is now available on many uniprocessor systems, there is still little experience with truly multiprocessor Ada implementations- This experience will grow rapidly in the near future, and it will probably prove the benefits of high level language features for the developments of new methods that successfully exploit the possibilities of parallel architectures.”

The authors - writing in 1997 - add:

The open question remains: why is Ada almost unused to develop parallel programs? We would like to suggest that the primary problem is related to the efficiency and performance issues.

and

The research by Goforth et al. was a very typical mainstream Ada application - control of autonomous telerobotic system - which is rather atypical for parallel scientific computing applications.

Are there better references on the topic that don’t require me to buy more books?  I am struggling to find accounts of successful applications of Ada’s parallelism in domains that have non-zero overlap with Fortran’s.

Jeff


Cheers,
--
..............Malcolm Cohen, NAG Oxford/Tokyo.

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