Representative Line: An Absolute Square

Seth S offers us something new: a representative line of Ada. We don't get much of that, and Ada isn't a particularly popular language, but Seth assures us that it is "unfairly maligned".

Since 1995, Ada has been an object oriented language, and offers a standard library, strong types, a message-passing approach to communicating with objects (which migrated into Objective-C but generally doesn't show up very often elsewhere). It's a fine, if less-used language, and I honestly can't say I've heard much maligning it (though I've never actually heard of anyone using it either").

Regardless, what we can malign is some bad code. Since the earliest versions of Ada, if you wanted to find the absolute value of a variable, you'd write an expression like this:

magra := abs(ra)

Seth inherited some code from someone with a Fortran background and a bias against using built in functions for their standard operations. So they wrote this instead:

MAGRA := SQRT(RA * RA)

Interestingly, this code highlights a micro-optimization. I'll allow Seth to explain:

the now-retired programmer was obsessed with throughput, so I assume he chose "RA * RA" instead of "RA ** 2" because earlier compilers could not be trusted to find the most efficient way to calculate the exponent

Of course, abs is faster than both options, so if only that programmer was just a little more obsessed with throughput.

Seth assures us that the rest of the code mirrors this: micro-optimizations that aren't actually useful, Fortran coding conventions in a not-Fortran language, and many, many re-invented wheels that are worse than the original.

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