On a mailing list concerned with another programming language (but not a
very well-known one*), the following comment appeared today:

> If you want to see a really slow compiler I suggest
> you try using ADA (yuk!) if you haven't already.

I suspect this may be based on not-very-current experience, and I would
like to provide some solid evidence that Ada compilers need not be slow.

Can anyone provide or point to any data that might be useful for this
purpose?  I didn't find anything during a brief check of the major Ada
web sites, but I'll do some more searching.

Of course, there are a great many variables influencing compilation speed,
but a few data points might be enough to counter the bad impression that
might have been made by the above remark.  It would be inappropriate to
get into a big discussion of Ada compilation speed on that mailing list,
but I think a brief response would be OK (possibly with a pointer to more
data).

- Jim Hassett


* The language is Clean, a pure and lazy functional programming language.
See http://www.cs.kun.nl/~clean