From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,f49c8f164340c377 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news2.google.com!news.glorb.com!newscon02.news.prodigy.net!prodigy.net!newsdst01.news.prodigy.net!prodigy.com!postmaster.news.prodigy.com!nlpi069.nbdc.sbc.com.POSTED!cfe18fef!not-for-mail From: Gary Scott Organization: Home User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Current status of Ada? References: <7744bf.vg4.ln@hunter.axlog.fr> <1188580722.187449.288030@m37g2000prh.googlegroups.com> <46dbeaba$0$24583$4d3efbfe@news.sover.net> In-Reply-To: <46dbeaba$0$24583$4d3efbfe@news.sover.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <0KWCi.5353$z_5.3614@nlpi069.nbdc.sbc.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 68.94.33.193 X-Complaints-To: abuse@prodigy.net X-Trace: nlpi069.nbdc.sbc.com 1188837372 ST000 68.94.33.193 (Mon, 03 Sep 2007 12:36:12 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2007 12:36:12 EDT X-UserInfo1: S[O]R^OGLBUUSWTXZBND]_\@VR]^@B@MCPWZKB]MPXHBTWICYFWUQBKZQLYJX\_ITFD_KFVLUN[DOM_A_NSYNWPFWNS[XV\I]PZ@BQ[@CDQDPCL^FKCBIPC@KLGEZEFNMDYMKHRL_YYYGDSSODXYN@[\BK[LVTWI@AXGQCOA_SAH@TPD^\AL\RLGRFWEARBM Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2007 11:36:10 -0500 Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:1707 Date: 2007-09-03T11:36:10-05:00 List-Id: Peter C. Chapin wrote: > Gary Scott wrote: > > >>I don't disagree that this would be an impact of such a line of >>questioning. I have no information that this occurred. It certainly >>never happened with me. However, I have discussed these issues with >>many programmers and it is a somewhat pervasive attitude that not >>keeping their C language skills honed places them at a competitive >>disadvantage. > > > This is a somewhat surprising attitude to me. Working with various > languages increases one's repertoire of programming methods and design > techniques. I should think that given a choice between a person who > knows C and nothing but C, and a person who has written non-trivial code > in C, Ada, Java, and (say) Lisp, the second person would be more likely > to be a better programmer... or a better software engineer. Yes, Working with multiple languages does. I however had to do that on my own. In one particular environment (test equipment), all of the models, real time data capture/processing, etc. were in extended Fortran 77 plus imbedded and standaline assembly modules. It wasn't that C would have improved the specific product at all, it was very well structured (although non-portable, but it was very hardware specific so it wouldn't be portable in any language). It was the feeling that the world was passing them by as EVERYTHING was in Fortran 77. At one point, the directive to use Ada applied to this environment as well so they began porting to Ada. However, the Ada compiler was so new and inefficient (little optimization), the application set would no longer execute on a system with several times the memory and CPU capacity of the Fortran/assembly based one. It eventually was completed, but this experience negatively tainted management against Ada. No other attemps were ever made that I am aware of to use Ada for the test environments. Likewise, there was no concerted attempt to understand WHY the Ada development foundered. It was of course a mixture of operating system inefficiency, compiler inefficiency, and software/hardware architecture inefficiency. The older system used extensive proprietary parallel processing, DMA, and shared memory and the new system used COTS message passing schemes. Before the advent of fast CPUs, there simply was no other way to accomplish the task in a cost efficient manner than to use parallel processing. With the advent of fast CPUs, much less thought goes into the hardware design with the thought that the CPU is so fast, we'll just emulate that part of the hardware in software or perform its processing job in a separate process or thread without really thinking through the overhead (cache utilization, interrupt processing, task switching time). > > Peter -- Gary Scott mailto:garylscott@sbcglobal dot net Fortran Library: http://www.fortranlib.com Support the Original G95 Project: http://www.g95.org -OR- Support the GNU GFortran Project: http://gcc.gnu.org/fortran/index.html If you want to do the impossible, don't hire an expert because he knows it can't be done. -- Henry Ford