Re: Feasibility of using Ada in new development

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Wojtek Narczynski" <wojtek@power.com.pl> wrote in message
news:5ad0dd8a.0409040738.3fff41b8@posting.google.com...
> - Even the most Ada-centric company in the world uses tons of legacy C
> code, and I don't think they will rewrite it in Ada any soon. Of
> course, that code is causing them a lot of problems, but would you
> call their business decision to stay with it, wrong?

This statement is demonstratably false. R.R. Software probably is the most
Ada-centric company in the world (certainly in the top 10!). The only C in
any of our products is a dozen lines in our (obsolete) Sun68K compiler.
We've got roughly 20,000 lines of assembler code, and everything else is in
Ada. (When we first started out circa 1980, we used Pascal, but all of that
code is either lost or automatically translated to Ada using our PasTran
tool.)

We do, of course, use OSes like Windows that have a lot of C code, but those
are black-boxes to us - we don't maintain those in any sense.

We've done things where it's possible another language would have done
better, but we haven't used other languages because (a) we didn't want to
depend any more than absolutely necessary on outside products; and/or (b)
the learning curve would be higher than the amount of time saved.

                                Randy.