Re: Teaching new tricks to an old dog (C++ -->Ada)

["Jerry Coffin" <jcoffin@taeus.com>]

Randy Brukardt wrote:

[ ... ]

> Why would the Internet not be used?

Two major reasons, plus a third upon which I'll elucidate further
below.

First of all, work on ARPAnet started out around the mid-1960's, but it
only became available to most of the public around the early 1990's or
so. Had development been delayed for 20 years or so until Ada compilers
were available, we'd be waiting another five years or so before it
became available to most of its current users.

Second, if the work had been done exclusively or primarily in a
language the DoD considered its own, I suspect opening it up to the
public would have taken even longer, if it was ever allowed to happen
at all.

> Ada is a fully general purpose programming language, and if the
> Internet was mostly written in Ada, the applications and uses
> would be pretty much the same (just with fewer trivial bugs).

Your claim of fewer bugs is just the sort of unsupported anti-C comment
we see all the time.

The third reason: if you look closely at most internet protocols, you
quickly realize that they have a distinctly "hackish" character. Most
work "well enough", but have massive defects from a theoretical
viewpoint.

The mindset that embraces Ada simply would never have designed things
that way. Heck, I'm clearly on the C++ side of the fence, and I stil
find many of them at least mildly distasteful. Had they been designed
by Ada programmers, the hackish character would be gone. Instead, the
system would be designed to operate in harmony as a coordinated system.
To ensure that, connecting to this system would only be allowed after
passing an extensive (and expensive) certification process, and only
one OS in existence would be capable of passing -- and it wouldn't be
from a bunch of hackers like Microsoft either. It would be from some
place thoroughly professional, with a thoroughly professional license
fee (i.e. well out of reach of over 99% of the people who currently use
the Internet).

Its users would all be ecstatic about how well it worked, and would be
able to tell each other about the other day when they ran it under a
simulated load, and it showed so little degradation that they just KNOW
it'll still work beautifully when it has grown to over a thousand
users!

--
    Later,
    Jerry.

The universe is a figment of its own imagination.