What to Do?

What to Do?

[Petra Lynn Hofman]

After reading several threads discussing C++, C#, Java and Ada I'm in a
quandry over what system to concentrate on.  I'm learning C++ at the
moment but wonder if that is the best choice.  After looking a Ada and
available jobs it would appear that there is limited opportunities for
someone >40 and outside of military/defense industries.  Comments and
opinions are greatly appreciated.  Petra.

Re: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <3A4F5A4A.9ABA2C4F@chicagonet.net>,
  Petra Lynn Hofman <petrahof@chicagonet.net> wrote:
> After reading several threads discussing C++, C#, Java and
Ada I'm in a
> quandry over what system to concentrate on.  I'm learning C++
at the
> moment but wonder if that is the best choice.  After looking
a Ada and
> available jobs it would appear that there is limited
opportunities for
> someone >40 and outside of military/defense industries.
Comments and
> opinions are greatly appreciated.


Well actually our experience is that there is an unsatisfied
demand for Ada programmers. Many companies are having trouble
staffing their Ada programs. Of course to a certain extent
that's just a special case of the trouble everyone is having
in getting competent programmers no matter what the programming
language that is involved.


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Re: What to Do?

[Ted Dennison]

In article <92nok7$cd6$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <3A4F5A4A.9ABA2C4F@chicagonet.net>,
>   Petra Lynn Hofman <petrahof@chicagonet.net> wrote:
> > moment but wonder if that is the best choice.  After looking
> > a Ada and available jobs it would appear that there is limited
> > opportunities for someone >40 and outside of military/defense
> > industries.

> Well actually our experience is that there is an unsatisfied
> demand for Ada programmers. Many companies are having trouble
> staffing their Ada programs. Of course to a certain extent

I certainly haven't had much trouble finding Ada work. I've had an
embarassment of riches in that respect. I don't kwow about the >40 bit
though. Supposedly caring about that is against the law in the US, and I
have worked with several older engineers before (usually contractors).
But not *actually* being in that position, I can't really
authoratatively comment.

Admittedly, every job I've worked was DoD. But I don't see why that
should be a problem for anyone. Even if you have moral qualms about
building weaponry, the DoD does a *lot* more than just that. I don't
think I've worked on an actual weapon once in my 13 years of doing this.
I've done NASA work, COMSEC (encryption devices), naval engine
controllers, and various simulators. Plus I've noticed that the large
DoD contractors tend to be a lot better about hiring and promoting women
and minorities than the smaller commercial-oriented houses. (Just my
unscientific observation there, YMMV)

--
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Re: What to Do?

[E. Robert Tisdale]

Petra Lynn Hofman wrote:

> After reading several threads discussing C++, C#, Java and Ada,
> I'm in a quandary over what system to concentrate on.
> I'm learning C++ at the moment but I wonder if that is the best choice.
> After looking a Ada and available jobs,
> it would appear that there is limited opportunities
> for someone > 40 years and outside of military/defense industries.
> Comments and opinions are greatly appreciated.

What do you do?

It's pretty hard to get a job as a professional programmer
if you only know one computer programming language.
Most of the subscribers to this newsgroup are amateur programmers.
They are hired and paid to do something else
and programming is just a low level skill
that they are expected to "pick-up" in the course of their careers
to help them with their work.

If you really mean to sell yourself in the marketplace
as a professional programmer,
you will need to learn all of the above languages and more.
Try to get a job writing programs for something you know about
then concentrate on whatever programming language(s)
your new employer is using.

Re: What to Do?

[tmoran]

In <3A4F759E.A7D63F3F@netwood.net>, "E. Robert Tisdale" <edwin@netwood.net>
said several bizarre things that I believe are quite incorrect.

  The fastest way to becoming a paid professional "programmer" is
to teach yourself PERL and take most of your wages in stock options.
That's probably not a good plan in the long term, though.

  Most of the subscribers to this newsgroup are paid professional
programmers in the wider sense of the word "programmer".  Many, if
not most, have spent substantial formal course time learning
programming in general, later applying their knowledge to
specific, and varied, application domains.

Re: What to Do?

[Robert Love]

>After reading several threads discussing C++, C#, Java and Ada I'm in a
>quandry over what system to concentrate on.  I'm learning C++ at the
>moment but wonder if that is the best choice.  After looking a Ada and
>available jobs it would appear that there is limited opportunities for
>someone >40 and outside of military/defense industries.  Comments and
>opinions are greatly appreciated.  Petra.

Here on New Year's Eve I went to Monster.com and did a search on 
Ada.  I came with with 735 hits.  Now you have to weed out the
ones where "ADA" is the Americans with Disabilities Act and where
American Dieticians Association registered personnel are being 
sought.  Lets say that rules out 25%.  Now you have many ads where
the job description text says "C/C++/Ada" where it is really not
an Ada job (why are HR types so frustrating to deal with?).  Lets
say we're down to 350 jobs.  Of these, many have multiple openings.
So I'd say there are good job opportunities.

Now your concerns about defense industry seem valid.  Ada is most
often used in systems deemed critical.  An airliner crashing due
to software has a much higher cost than somebody's web page crashing.
So Ada is most often used in transportation and weapons systems. 
Also, NASA is doing lots of work in Ada for the International Space
Station if you have reservations about working for the military.
There are web sites referenced in this newsgroup that track other 
non-military projects using Ada.  Our European & Canadian cousins
seem a little wiser in this area.

As for the over 40 thing, I suspect most of us reading here are over
40.  Hiring somebody as a new programmer that late in life is rare but
it happens.  The key is to get some experience programming in a
professional environment, regardless of language.  Then other
opportunities will open.


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Re: What to Do?

[Marin David Condic]

Robert Dewar wrote:

> Well actually our experience is that there is an unsatisfied
> demand for Ada programmers. Many companies are having trouble
> staffing their Ada programs. Of course to a certain extent
> that's just a special case of the trouble everyone is having
> in getting competent programmers no matter what the programming
> language that is involved.

Well, there are certainly jobs out there for people who know how to use
Ada. The problem is that they are rather sparsely distributed. You won't
find them in just any old town like you might find C++ jobs or maybe
Java jobs. So some of it depends on your willingness to relocate to the
places where Ada is being used.

MDC
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Re: What to Do?

[Marin David Condic]

I hear tell that there are commercial operations that use Ada. However, I
have never personally run into one or seen an ad in a job posting somewhere
looking for Ada experience that wasn't in some way connected to the DoD. I
would be *very* happy to be proven wrong on this repeatedly. :-)

Ada is a great language, but it just doesn't seem to have met with the same
commercial success as some other languages. I really wish it would, but I
think that without some major institutional sponsorship, it will have a hard
time doing so. Part of the problem may be tools, but certainly a big part of
the problem is that there isn't a Sun or a Microsoft pushing the language.
When the DoD stopped pushing Ada, lots of defense contractors bailed out of
it fast - needing Ada programmers mostly for maintaining legacy systems.

Any ideas who might make a good sponsor for Ada? Maybe we could lobby
them???

MDC

Ted Dennison wrote:

> Admittedly, every job I've worked was DoD. But I don't see why that
> should be a problem for anyone. Even if you have moral qualms about
> building weaponry, the DoD does a *lot* more than just that. I don't
> think I've worked on an actual weapon once in my 13 years of doing this.
> I've done NASA work, COMSEC (encryption devices), naval engine
> controllers, and various simulators. Plus I've noticed that the large
> DoD contractors tend to be a lot better about hiring and promoting women
> and minorities than the smaller commercial-oriented houses. (Just my
> unscientific observation there, YMMV)

--
======================================================================
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Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey
    and car keys to teenage boys."

        --   P. J. O'Rourke
======================================================================

Re: What to Do?

[Marin David Condic]

"E. Robert Tisdale" wrote:

> It's pretty hard to get a job as a professional programmer
> if you only know one computer programming language.
> Most of the subscribers to this newsgroup are amateur programmers.
> They are hired and paid to do something else
> and programming is just a low level skill
> that they are expected to "pick-up" in the course of their careers
> to help them with their work.
>

I'm not sure why you think most of the posters here are amateur programmers?
We have a fair amount of students who post here, but I get the impression
that the bulk of us actually earn a living every day by working with
software. Maybe some of us don't use Ada every day - our jobs may demand the
use of other languages. Perhaps because many of us build devices that use
software as only one component you think that we are primarily electrical
engineers or mechanical engineers, etc? I think its pretty clear that at
least most of the people who post here regularly seem to have a good deal of
knowledge concerning software engineering, language design, practical
software experience, etc. If they are "amateurs" then they must be extremely
skilled "amateurs".

MDC
--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

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    and car keys to teenage boys."

        --   P. J. O'Rourke
======================================================================

Re: What to Do?

[Ehud Lamm]

Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org> wrote in message
news:3A50ABDF.3A8F6C0D@acm.org...
>
> I'm not sure why you think most of the posters here are amateur
programmers?
> We have a fair amount of students who post here, but I get the impression
> that the bulk of us actually earn a living every day by working with
> software. Maybe some of us don't use Ada every day - our jobs may demand
the
> use of other languages. Perhaps because many of us build devices that use
> software as only one component you think that we are primarily electrical
> engineers or mechanical engineers, etc? I think its pretty clear that at
> least most of the people who post here regularly seem to have a good deal
of
> knowledge concerning software engineering, language design, practical
> software experience, etc. If they are "amateurs" then they must be
extremely
> skilled "amateurs".
>

I'd hire most of this amateurs in a second. (Currently I work teaching, but
I had my share of actual work).

In fact, I think one problem Ada had (note past tense) was lack of amateurs.
As opposed to such "cool" languages like C++ and Java (and in the old day
Turbo Pascal), most hobbyist never hear of Ada, or hear misleading info (see
Jargon File).
I think these days things are changing a bit (I am judging mainly from this
group,  AdaPower etc.)

I think that if we succeed in making the Ada community larger, by attracting
hobbyists, the "real world" situation will improve too.
(I still haven't found the time to write "Why should Hackers Love Ada?"
If anyone wnats to write it, feel free...)

Ehud

Re: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <3A50A139.182F4EED@acm.org>,
  Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org> wrote:
> I hear tell that there are commercial operations that use
Ada. However, I
> have never personally run into one or seen an ad in a job
posting somewhere
> looking for Ada experience that wasn't in some way connected
to the DoD. I
> would be *very* happy to be proven wrong on this repeatedly.
:-)

I have frequently been asked by large companies doing non-DoD
related work if I can recommend Ada programmers .... I think
a lot of the recruitment works this way, rather than with
published ads.


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Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Warren W. Gay VE3WWG]

Ehud Lamm wrote:
> Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org> wrote in message
> news:3A50ABDF.3A8F6C0D@acm.org...
> > I'm not sure why you think most of the posters here are amateur
> programmers?
...SNIP...
> In fact, I think one problem Ada had (note past tense) was lack of amateurs.
> As opposed to such "cool" languages like C++ and Java (and in the old day
> Turbo Pascal), most hobbyist never hear of Ada, or hear misleading info (see
> Jargon File).
> I think these days things are changing a bit (I am judging mainly from this
> group,  AdaPower etc.)
> 
> I think that if we succeed in making the Ada community larger, by attracting
> hobbyists, the "real world" situation will improve too.
> (I still haven't found the time to write "Why should Hackers Love Ada?"
> If anyone wnats to write it, feel free...)
> 
> Ehud

First of all, I like the idea of the book. It should be written.

I think that people that truly love to write software, usually enjoy the
satisfaction of doing something well. I believe that Ada makes this possible,
since the compiler is able to eliminate so many mundane, and even stupid
errors that we do not want to expend our free time on. In this way, Ada
allows the computer to work for YOU, instead of the other way round.

The compiler also does this effortlessly at runtime as well (with the
appropriate checks enabled). Finally, the exceptions point to the source
of the problem immediately (in most cases, to the module and line #).

(Advocacy mode on..)

If you subscribe to the Linux, FreeBSD and Windows security advisory 
mailing lists, you will be made painfully aware of how insecure today's 
really software is. As a person with over 20 years of programming experience, 
it just seems to me, that this is not a good sign!  Our industry has not
learned any lessons here, and we continue to build.

This is serious, because we are now building upon several layers of
previously built software. Anyone that builds a tower knows that the
foundation needs to be firm and secure. Yet today, we continue to build
upon faulty foundations. (Consider MOTIF, on Intrinsics, on X11, on the
C libraries, on the kernel, --or-- the instabilities of your 
not-so-favourite Windows platform).

Ada95 it seems, provides a glimmer of hope. Many people claim that we
don't write "mission-critical" software for every day use.

    I beg to disagree!

As soon as you connect your computer to the Internet, you now are very
concerned about the security of your system and it's files (incidentally,
it is now possible for a virus to issue IDE commands to the newer IDE
disk drives that will cause them to destroy themselves: this means that
a hacker now has the ability to destroy some of your hardware as well).

If you don't consider your files, your privacy and your hardware worth
protecting, then I might agree that you don't need mission-critical
software. While people won't die if my site gets hacked, to ME, it is very
imporant that it does not get hacked-- to me, it is mission-critical.

(Although if someone hacks my site, destroys my diskdrive, people
and pets could die from smoke or a fire caused by a damaged disk drive).

I would like to see the Free Software Foundation start developing with Ada95.
The GNU Hurd has been slow to develop, but I would love to see a new
effort started in Ada95 instead, with associated tools written in the
same. The OS would have a "mission-critical" mission as it affects
security.  There was someone that has announced that they
are developing an Ada based kernel, and I wish them luck. However, it
is such an ambitious undertaking, that I wish for the day when the FSF
would take it up (or contribute).

I think if the FSF were to adopt Ada95 for more development, this would
help bring Ada credibility to those that have yet to give it a chance.

Richard Stallman, are you listening?

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://members.home.net/ve3wwg

Re: What to Do?

[Ted Dennison]

In article <3A50A139.182F4EED@acm.org>,
  Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org> wrote:
> I hear tell that there are commercial operations that use Ada.
> However, I have never personally run into one or seen an ad in a job
> posting somewhere looking for Ada experience that wasn't in some way
> connected to the DoD. I would be *very* happy to be proven wrong on
> this repeatedly. :-)

I actually had a job offer once for a commercial Ada job. It was with
Honeywell (sp?), and most of their stuff was civil aviation. Since they
told me that they had their own Ada compiler, which was also used by
some other companies, I suspect they aren't the only ones in that
industry using it.

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Ted Dennison]

In article <3A50C371.8B7B871@home.com>,
  "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@home.com> wrote:

> I would like to see the Free Software Foundation start developing with
> Ada95.

I think the best way to achieve this would be though steady infiltration
of Ada95 software into their codebase. The folks doing the Gnu Visual
Debugger ( http://libre.act-europe.fr/gvd/ ) are currently making the
best inroads there, but I think a simultanious attack from multiple
fronts might be most effective.


> The GNU Hurd has been slow to develop, but I would love to see a new
> effort started in Ada95 instead, with associated tools written in the
> same. The OS would have a "mission-critical" mission as it affects
> security.  There was someone that has announced that they
> are developing an Ada based kernel, and I wish them luck. However, it
> is such an ambitious undertaking, that I wish for the day when the FSF
> would take it up (or contribute).

You would be referring to AdaOS ( http://www.adaos.org ). If they ever
get started, I don't see why it would be any less viable than Hurd. The
FSF is just a tax-deductable umbrella group. I don't think them "taking
up" a project would really have much practical effect (outside of
evangelizing).

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Ehud Lamm]

Warren W. Gay VE3WWG <ve3wwg@home.com> wrote in message
news:3A50C371.8B7B871@home.com...
> Ehud Lamm wrote:
> > (I still haven't found the time to write "Why should Hackers Love Ada?"
> > If anyone wnats to write it, feel free...)
> >
>
> First of all, I like the idea of the book. It should be written.

I was thinking of an article...
Not that a book would be a bad idea, but this is too much for me at the
moment.

One possiblity is to have a slef-published book ("publish on demand")
created as a group effort, with people in the Ada community contributing.
If there is interest to pursue this, I can be more specific in what I have
in mind.

Ehud

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <92qi97$9pc$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> wrote:
> You would be referring to AdaOS ( http://www.adaos.org ). If
> they ever get started, I don't see why it would be any less
> viable than Hurd. The FSF is just a tax-deductable umbrella
> group.

An odd and wrong claim! The FSF definitely develops software,
and has hired people over the years as software engineers (and
of course RMS himself is a software developer -- he would be
happy to subsitute the term hacker). Most (nearly all) the work
on HURD has been done by the FSF, which is far more than just
an umbrella group.

Ted, where *do* you get your (mis)information from? :-)

Robert


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <92qi97$9pc$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> wrote:
> The FSF is just a tax-deductable umbrella group.

Probably what is happening here is that T.E.D. is getting
the FSF confused with the GNU project.


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Re: What to Do?

[Lao Xiao Hai]

Marin David Condic wrote:

> I hear tell that there are commercial operations that use Ada. However, I
> have never personally run into one or seen an ad in a job posting somewhere
> looking for Ada experience that wasn't in some way connected to the DoD. I
> would be *very* happy to be proven wrong on this repeatedly. :-)

We have had several non-Dod Ada clients over the past fourteen years of
consulting and training in Ada.    Not all of them have been a rousing
success.   Last week I visited one of them in Silicon Valley.   They have
pretty much abandoned Ada in favor of C++.

The reasons?

             1) It is easier to recruit C++ programmers.
             2) They find more software in C++ matching their needs.
             3) The one person in management who was an Ada enthusiast
                  has left the company.   His replacement is a C++ advocate.

This is not an isolated case.  We have seen it before.  One early Ada 95 client
for
safety-critical software was excited about using Ada.   Against our advice, they

selected a compiler from a large, well-known compiler publisher.   This
publisher
did not have a full implementation of Ada 95 and was also transitioning to other

business interests.    The excitement about Ada turned into disappointment.  We
recommended some alternatives, but disillusionment had already manifested itself

among the programming staff and they decided on another course.

Richard Riehle

Re: What to Do?

[Robert Love]

>>>>> "RL" == Robert Love <rlove@neosoft.com> writes:


    RL> Here on New Year's Eve I went to Monster.com and did a search
    RL> on Ada.  I came with with 735 hits.  Now you have to weed out
    RL> the ones where "ADA" is the Americans with Disabilities Act
    RL> and where American Dieticians Association registered personnel
    RL> are being sought.  Lets say that rules out 25%.  Now you have
    RL> many ads where the job description text says "C/C++/Ada" where
    RL> it is really not an Ada job (why are HR types so frustrating
    RL> to deal with?).  Lets say we're down to 350 jobs.  Of these,
    RL> many have multiple openings.  So I'd say there are good job
    RL> opportunities.

Following up on my earlier posting I read the text of many of the
735 ads posted on monster.  I'm revising the number of valid 
entries downward to about 200.   There are new, clumsy uses of 
the phrase "ada".  It used to be that you would see this as
a keyword in ads for HR people, meaning they would have to have
an understanding of the Americans with Disabilities Act.  Now I
see it in software ads but having nothing to do with our favorite
language.  Now its being used to mean "being able to sit and work
at a computer terminal".  Now I would think that this is a given
for anyone wishing to become a programmer.  Damn lawyers.

Also, way too many of the ads were about translating Ada to C++.


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Re: What to Do?

[Lao Xiao Hai]

Ehud Lamm wrote:

> In fact, I think one problem Ada had (note past tense) was lack of amateurs.
> As opposed to such "cool" languages like C++ and Java (and in the old day
> Turbo Pascal), most hobbyist never hear of Ada, or hear misleading info (see
> Jargon File).

While visiting a friend who is a professor at a well-known university in the
Western U.S., I asked him about Ada at their school.   When I made my inquiry,
we were touring their new computer lab facilities.  His answer was that they
had pretty much abandoned Ada in favor of more relevant languages.   A nearby
student overheard our conversation.   "Ada?   Oh that's GNAT.   I have it
downloaded on my machine and have been experimenting with it."

My friend was as surprised as I.   One of the good things that has happened is
the free availability of GNAT along with its source code.   There are actually
students out there learning about compilers and languages by downloading GNAT
and examining its implementation.

Upon being introduced to the Department Chair that same day, I learned that he
despised Ada.   To his arteriosclerotic mind Ada was old, clunky, hard to
understand, irrelevant, expensive, and just not worth the time.   Psychologists
call this kind of observation, "projection."  I am sure many students felt the
same way about him. We can be thankful for the uncongealed minds of our
students.

Richard Riehle

Re: What to Do?

[Ehud Lamm]

Lao Xiao Hai <laoxhai@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:3A50F89E.414673FE@ix.netcom.com...
>
>
> Ehud Lamm wrote:
>
> > In fact, I think one problem Ada had (note past tense) was lack of
amateurs.
> > As opposed to such "cool" languages like C++ and Java (and in the old
day
> > Turbo Pascal), most hobbyist never hear of Ada, or hear misleading info
(see
> > Jargon File).
>
> While visiting a friend who is a professor at a well-known university in
the
> Western U.S., I asked him about Ada at their school.   When I made my
inquiry,
> we were touring their new computer lab facilities.  His answer was that
they
> had pretty much abandoned Ada in favor of more relevant languages.   A
nearby
> student overheard our conversation.   "Ada?   Oh that's GNAT.   I have it
> downloaded on my machine and have been experimenting with it."

Note the "(note past tense)" above. I think things are improving. Alas, your
story is not the general case. My students usually come with attitudes
similar to the professor's...

Ehud

Re: What to Do?

[David Kristola]

On Mon, 1 Jan 2001 9:08:47 -0800, Ehud Lamm wrote
(in message <92qdnn$jfg$1@news.huji.ac.il>):

> In fact, I think one problem Ada had (note past tense) was lack of amateurs. 
> As opposed to such "cool" languages like C++ and Java (and in the old day 
> Turbo Pascal), most hobbyist never hear of Ada, or hear misleading info (see 
> Jargon File). I think these days things are changing a bit (I am judging 
> mainly from this group,  AdaPower etc.)
> 
> I think that if we succeed in making the Ada community larger, by attracting 
> hobbyists, the "real world" situation will improve too. (I still haven't 
> found the time to write "Why should Hackers Love Ada?" If anyone wnats to 
> write it, feel free...)

I've been an Ada advocate on a few of the MUD news groups.  Many people 
over there have not even heard of the language.  On the other hand, 
many are programming MUDs specifically to learn "C/C++".

Good free software is important to most (if not all) hobbyists.  Many 
are students with limited resources exploring new ideas.  GNAT makes 
Ada freely available (thanks Ada Core Technologies!).

If anyone here is interested in watching the development process, i've 
been posting new alpha versions of SAM (Simple Ada MUD) on my website:

http://members.aol.com/drveg/mud/index.html

--djk, keeper of arcane lore & trivial fluff

PS:  Who would have guessed that Milpitas CA (USA) would be a hotbed 
for hobbyist Ada development?  Bill Dale recently posted information 
about his hobbyist Ada development activities here in Milpitas.

Re: What to Do?

[Brian Rogoff]

On Mon, 1 Jan 2001, David Kristola wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Jan 2001 9:08:47 -0800, Ehud Lamm wrote
> (in message <92qdnn$jfg$1@news.huji.ac.il>):
> 
> > In fact, I think one problem Ada had (note past tense) was lack of 
> > amateurs. 

I agree! I've said before that we need more Ada hackers. I think the high 
quality student versions of GNAT really make this possible, and the
existence of adapower as a sort of "Ada central" fills the void caused by 
the HBAP flakeout.

> > As opposed to such "cool" languages like C++ and Java (and in the old day 
> > Turbo Pascal), most hobbyist never hear of Ada, or hear misleading info (see 
> > Jargon File). I think these days things are changing a bit (I am judging 
> > mainly from this group,  AdaPower etc.)
> > 
> > I think that if we succeed in making the Ada community larger, by attracting 
> > hobbyists, the "real world" situation will improve too. (I still haven't 
> > found the time to write "Why should Hackers Love Ada?" If anyone wnats to 
> > write it, feel free...)

I'm glad "hacker" is not being used in a pejorative sense!

> I've been an Ada advocate on a few of the MUD news groups.  Many people 
> over there have not even heard of the language.  On the other hand, 
> many are programming MUDs specifically to learn "C/C++".
> 
> Good free software is important to most (if not all) hobbyists.  Many 
> are students with limited resources exploring new ideas.  GNAT makes 
> Ada freely available (thanks Ada Core Technologies!).

GNAT has saved Ada from oblivion IMO, or at least delayed it sufficiently
long that its an interesting option. 

> PS:  Who would have guessed that Milpitas CA (USA) would be a hotbed 
> for hobbyist Ada development?  Bill Dale recently posted information 
> about his hobbyist Ada development activities here in Milpitas.

Maybe we need a Silly Valley Ada Users Group?

-- Brian (in Santa Clara, the belly of the beast)

Re: What to Do?

[tmoran]

>Maybe we need a Silly Valley Ada Users Group?
  I'll join!

Re: What to Do?

[Ehud Lamm]

Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> wrote in message
news:Pine.BSF.4.21.0101011632350.9452-100000@shell5.ba.best.com...
> On Mon, 1 Jan 2001, David Kristola wrote:
> > On Mon, 1 Jan 2001 9:08:47 -0800, Ehud Lamm wrote
> > (in message <92qdnn$jfg$1@news.huji.ac.il>):
> >
> > > I think that if we succeed in making the Ada community larger, by
attracting
> > > hobbyists, the "real world" situation will improve too. (I still
haven't
> > > found the time to write "Why should Hackers Love Ada?" If anyone wnats
to
> > > write it, feel free...)
>
> I'm glad "hacker" is not being used in a pejorative sense!
>

I thought I'd share the first paragraph I wrote (ages ago), since it may
best give the flavor of what I have in mind:

                   Why should Hackers love Ada?

  Ada is one of the lagnauges that hackers fear and loath. The view as
descirbed
  by ESR in the Jargon file is that Ada is an "elephantine bulk." But this
is
  an elephant that can do tricks, and that has the mentallity of a
super-smart,
  cat-in-the-hat. I am not going to try to influence anyone into using Ada
  nor am I going to try to refute the claims that the language is large or
that
  it was designed by a committee. Though false, these are more interesting
  historically than technically. I am just going to list several features of
  the language, that I think can appeal to anyone who likes to hack, and
that
  are worth checking out. I leave it to the readers to make their own minds.


Ehud

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Cesar Scarpini Rabak]

"Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" wrote:
> 
[snipped]
> 
> First of all, I like the idea of the book. It should be written.

A book! Let's start with an article and have it published in Dr. Dobbs's
Mag first!

just my .019...

> (Advocacy mode on..)
[snipped]

Whereas fine points are brought here, i would like to point that
software security/safety does not come from language but several other
things...

I counter case, usually used by Ada disgusters is the famous ESA Arianne
rocket, although programmed in Ada it made a very expensive piece of
hardware burn (literally!) due an error in design, notwitstanding the
supposed high quality language (and btw process) to build the softaware.

Cesar

Re: What to Do?

[Marin David Condic]

Granted, there are jobs that are out there which people come across by
means other than internet postings, etc. Its just that it has been my
observation that - while Ada jobs exist - they tend to be located in
specific areas and usually have some sort of DoD spinoff. (Pratt &
Whitney uses Ada for some of its commercial work, but that was because
the military side demonstrated that it worked better.)

My observation concerning job postings is that in just about any city or
town in the US, you can usually find companies that are advertising for
C/C++ programmers or Java programmers or a handful of other things. You
just don't see anyone posting a need for Ada programmers in every
location in the country. That's not to say that jobs don't exist - just
to say you might be limited geographically.

MDC

Robert Dewar wrote:

> I have frequently been asked by large companies doing non-DoD
> related work if I can recommend Ada programmers .... I think
> a lot of the recruitment works this way, rather than with
> published ads.

--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey
    and car keys to teenage boys."

        --   P. J. O'Rourke
======================================================================

Re: What to Do?

[Ted Dennison]

In article <Pine.BSF.4.21.0101011632350.9452-100000@shell5.ba.best.com>,
  Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 1 Jan 2001 9:08:47 -0800, Ehud Lamm wrote
> > (in message <92qdnn$jfg$1@news.huji.ac.il>):
> > > hobbyists, the "real world" situation will improve too. (I still
> > > haven't found the time to write "Why should Hackers Love Ada?" If
> > > anyone wnats to write it, feel free...)
>
> I'm glad "hacker" is not being used in a pejorative sense!

If it were, it should be changed to "Hate Ada". Perhaps something like
that would be a good chapter name ("Why Crackers Fear Ada"). After all,
Ada renders buffer overflow exploits unproductive (except perhaps as a
denial-of-service attack). Cult of the Dead Cow has an entire website
devoted to finding and exploiting buffer overflows.

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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Re: What to Do?

[Marin David Condic]

Honeywell may have picked up Ada from its defense related endeavors. (They
still make things like Ring Laser Gyros, etc., for the govt. don't they?) I
know that there are pockets of Ada usage in the commercial sector - how
could the compiler vendors stay alive if all they had were defense
contractors? My point was that while there are pockets of use in the
commercial side of things, it just isn't so widespread as to make Ada jobs
available in any county in the US. Whereas, if you look for programming
positions in C/C++ or Java or a few other things, you'll almost always find
at least *some* positions in just about any area you care to look.

As I said in the previous post, I would be delighted to be proven wrong.
I'd very much like to see Ada have enough market penetration that there was
at least one company in every county in the US using Ada. I think that
would be the "Critical Mass" point for the language.

MDC



Ted Dennison wrote:

> I actually had a job offer once for a commercial Ada job. It was with
> Honeywell (sp?), and most of their stuff was civil aviation. Since they
> told me that they had their own Ada compiler, which was also used by
> some other companies, I suspect they aren't the only ones in that
> industry using it.

--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey
    and car keys to teenage boys."

        --   P. J. O'Rourke
======================================================================

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Ted Dennison]

In article <92qp32$eul$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <92qi97$9pc$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> wrote:
> > You would be referring to AdaOS ( http://www.adaos.org ). If
> > they ever get started, I don't see why it would be any less
> > viable than Hurd. The FSF is just a tax-deductable umbrella
> > group.
>
> An odd and wrong claim! The FSF definitely develops software,
> and has hired people over the years as software engineers (and
> of course RMS himself is a software developer -- he would be
> happy to subsitute the term hacker). Most (nearly all) the work
> on HURD has been done by the FSF, which is far more than just
> an umbrella group.

Well, I guess that shouldn't be too horribly shocking for the HURD, as
it is the reason for the formation of the GNU project in the first
place. But how many other projects share that status?

> Ted, where *do* you get your (mis)information from? :-)

By looking around applying my stupefying intellect, of course! :-)

I can tell you, with a little lead notice, who pays for the development
work for the a lot principlals involved in the Linux kernel, its various
window managers, plus a lot of scripting languages, compilers, etc. But
the FSF would not be (to my knowledge) in any of the above. Further,
I've never heard of the FSF jumping on a project and funding further
development. But perhaps its just the circles I travel in that's
constraining my view of things...

You'd be in a better situation than anyone here to comment on this, due
to your first-hand experience as a maintainer of an official GNU project
(Gnat). Does the FSF acually kick in funds for the development and/or
maintanence of Gnat?

I suppose they have to be doing *something* with all that money they get
from selling manuals and T-Shirts...

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Ted Dennison]

In article <92qp4t$ev3$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <92qi97$9pc$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> wrote:
> > The FSF is just a tax-deductable umbrella group.
>
> Probably what is happening here is that T.E.D. is getting
> the FSF confused with the GNU project.

Its not tough to do. Both their .org URLs load the same page. Their
quick explanation on the front page reads:

The Free Software Foundation is a tax-exempt charity that raises funds
for work on the GNU Project.

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <92t8l2$bnd$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> wrote:
> Does the FSF acually kick in funds for the development and/or
> maintanence of Gnat?

No, they fund their own development projects (in fact the son
of a friend of mine worked at FSF full time as a programmer for
a couple of years ...)



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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <92t8q0$bqc$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> wrote:
> The Free Software Foundation is a tax-exempt charity that
> raises funds for work on the GNU Project.


And from this statement, you conclude that the FSF does
not do any work on the GNU Project? :-)



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Re: What to Do?

[David Kristola]

On Mon, 1 Jan 2001 19:14:52 -0800, tmoran@acm.org wrote
(in message <MIb46.71623$A06.2397053@news1.frmt1.sfba.home.com>):

>> Maybe we need a Silly Valley Ada Users Group?
>   I'll join!

When and where?


-- 
--djk, keeper of arcane lore & trivial fluff
Home: David95036 plus 1 at america on-line
Spam: goto.hades@welovespam.com

Re: What to Do? Silly Valley

[JF Harrison]

> Maybe we need a Silly Valley Ada Users Group?
>
> -- Brian (in Santa Clara, the belly of the beast)

I'd join.  Still learning Ada, but isnt that part of what a club/users group
is all about?
-JF in San Francisco

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Florian Weimer]

Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> writes:

> I can tell you, with a little lead notice, who pays for the development
> work for the a lot principlals involved in the Linux kernel, its various
> window managers, plus a lot of scripting languages, compilers, etc. But
> the FSF would not be (to my knowledge) in any of the above.

AFAIK, the FSF funded the development of GNU libc 2 (and perhaps still
does, I'm not sure).

> I suppose they have to be doing *something* with all that money they get
> from selling manuals and T-Shirts...

Paying lawyers? ;-)

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Florian Weimer]

Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> writes:

> I can tell you, with a little lead notice, who pays for the development
> work for the a lot principlals involved in the Linux kernel, its various
> window managers, plus a lot of scripting languages, compilers, etc. But
> the FSF would not be (to my knowledge) in any of the above.

AFAIK, the FSF funded the development of GNU libc 2 (and perhaps still
does, I'm not sure).

> I suppose they have to be doing *something* with all that money they get
> from selling manuals and T-Shirts...

Paying lawyers to design license agreements and copyright assignment
contracts? ;-)

They also have some machines on the net for distributing and
maintaining GNU software.  I don't know if the MIT AI Lab still
provides the network connection; otherwise running ftp.gnu.org would
cost something, too.

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Ted Dennison]

In article <92tde4$g29$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <92t8q0$bqc$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> wrote:
> > The Free Software Foundation is a tax-exempt charity that
> > raises funds for work on the GNU Project.
>
> And from this statement, you conclude that the FSF does
> not do any work on the GNU Project? :-)

No. I was just illustrating how thin the line between the two is.

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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Re: What to Do?

[Ted Dennison]

In article <01HW.B6777B790071DA4C078EC71C@news.pacbell.net>,
  David Kristola <David95037@See-My.Sig> wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Jan 2001 19:14:52 -0800, tmoran@acm.org wrote
> (in message <MIb46.71623$A06.2397053@news1.frmt1.sfba.home.com>):
>
> >> Maybe we need a Silly Valley Ada Users Group?
> >   I'll join!
>
> When and where?

Hmmm. I'd be tempted to pose a similar question about NorthEastern
Oklahoma, but somehow I doubt I'd get quite so many responses....
:-)

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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Re: What to Do? Silly Valley

[William Dale]

The ACM SIGAda Bay Area Chapter has been dormant for quite a while.  I
have an action to help revive it sometime before the LinuxWorld Expo in
August 2001 here in San Jose.  

If anyone would like to get involved here in Silly Valley please let me
know. I hope to hold a BOF at the LinuxWorld Expo event to get it kicked
off?  A meeting sooner would be possible as well.

JF Harrison wrote:
> 
> > Maybe we need a Silly Valley Ada Users Group?
> >
> > -- Brian (in Santa Clara, the belly of the beast)
> 
> I'd join.  Still learning Ada, but isnt that part of what a club/users group
> is all about?
> -JF in San Francisco

William Dale
"Ada has made you lazy and careless.
You can write programs in C that are just as safe
by the simple application of super-human diligence."
mailto:william.dale.jr+adanews@lmco.com
mailto:n2rhv+adanews@arrl.net

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Warren W. Gay VE3WWG]

Cesar Scarpini Rabak wrote:
> "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" wrote:
> [snipped]
> > First of all, I like the idea of the book. It should be written.
> 
> A book! Let's start with an article and have it published in Dr. Dobbs's
> Mag first!
> 
> just my .019...

Articles are also fine ;-)

> > (Advocacy mode on..)
> [snipped]
> 
> Whereas fine points are brought here, i would like to point that
> software security/safety does not come from language but several other
> things...

I'm not suggesting that the Ada95 language and/or compiler will solve all
security problems, or even reliability ones. But it does allow your CPU
to point out a lot of very common problems that lead to unreliable and/or
insecure programs. If you focus on all other aspects of security, as people
do when the write in C/C++/Java for example, then you leave unecessary
risks within the system. In a nutshell, Ada95 greatly improves the chances
of a program being correct, and less likely to be exploitable. 

> I counter case, usually used by Ada disgusters is the famous ESA Arianne
> rocket, although programmed in Ada it made a very expensive piece of
> hardware burn (literally!) due an error in design, notwitstanding the
> supposed high quality language (and btw process) to build the softaware.
> 
> Cesar

You can never eliminate human error or stupidity completely. I am sure many 
here on this news group could site "stupid Ada tricks" that are not the 
fault of the language or its tools, but of those USING the "tool". Kinda 
like the apprentice mechanic that uses a caliper as a C-clamp.

Your example is more the design/human-error type, which again, is not
completely avoidable. At least you can say that Ada did exactly as it
was told to do, when it burned it's hardware!  What more can you ask
of a computer?

You can't tell HAL to lie. He won't cope with that, no matter what the 
language used. ;-)

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://members.home.net/ve3wwg

Re: What to Do?

[William Starner]

Lao Xiao Hai wrote:
> My friend was as surprised as I.   One of the good things that has happened is
> the free availability of GNAT along with its source code.   There are actually
> students out there learning about compilers and languages by downloading GNAT
> and examining its implementation.

I, for one, picked up Ada after reading J.P. Barnes' book on Ada and playing
around with GNAT. I probably wouldn't have used Ada had it not been for GNAT,
not having a spare few hundred dollars to spare playing around with a language.
 
> Upon being introduced to the Department Chair that same day, I learned that he
> despised Ada.   To his arteriosclerotic mind Ada was old, clunky, hard to
> understand, irrelevant, expensive, and just not worth the time.   

I don't know if this is specific to Ada. I know a senior professor who thinks
Fortran 77 is the height of programming languages and that there's no reason to
use any other language. 

--
David Starner - dvdeug@hushmail.com (dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org off vacation)

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Georg Bauhaus]

Ted Dennison (dennison@telepath.com) wrote:

: I think the best way to achieve this would be though steady infiltration
: of Ada95 software into their codebase. The folks doing the Gnu Visual
: Debugger ( http://libre.act-europe.fr/gvd/ ) are currently making the
: best inroads there, but I think a simultanious attack from multiple
: fronts might be most effective.

Hm, attacking from multiple fronts has usually led
to death, starving, or surrender...Not to making someone
see ?

my 2c (Euro)

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Ted Dennison]

In article <92vrkj$jh5$1@news-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>,
  sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de (Georg Bauhaus) wrote:
> Ted Dennison (dennison@telepath.com) wrote:
>
> : best inroads there, but I think a simultanious attack from multiple
> : fronts might be most effective.
>
> Hm, attacking from multiple fronts has usually led
> to death, starving, or surrender...Not to making someone
> see ?

Well, its just a metaphor...

Seeing as you are posting from a German ISP, I suppose I can understand
your not liking the metaphor. Feel free to substitute one more to taste. :-)

(Serious followups to this thread should probably go somewhere under
soc.history.war)

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Cesar Scarpini Rabak]

"Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" wrote:
> 
> Cesar Scarpini Rabak wrote:
> > "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" wrote:
> > [snipped]
> > > First of all, I like the idea of the book. It should be written.
> >
> > A book! Let's start with an article and have it published in Dr. Dobbs's
> > Mag first!
> >
> > just my .019...
> 
> Articles are also fine ;-)

Great, lets see if we get enough material to pump a good one!
Incidentally, Dr. Dobbs _did_ publish an article about GNAT some time
ago (my personal library is all packed from a recent office moving and
could not pinpoint in their site).

> 
> > > (Advocacy mode on..)
> > [snipped]
> >
> > Whereas fine points are brought here, i would like to point that
> > software security/safety does not come from language but several other
> > things...
> 
> I'm not suggesting that the Ada95 language and/or compiler will solve all
> security problems, or even reliability ones. But it does allow your CPU
> to point out a lot of very common problems that lead to unreliable and/or
> insecure programs. If you focus on all other aspects of security, as people
> do when the write in C/C++/Java for example, then you leave unecessary
> risks within the system. In a nutshell, Ada95 greatly improves the chances
> of a program being correct, and less likely to be exploitable.

Agreed. But, again we're lost in the "mainstream" school of thought.
Java advocates convinced the masses that the "only" dangerous feature of
a nice language (C++) was pointers so they made an elegant one (only OO)
w/o pointers... and rest is history. (Anedoctically  it can be added
that in the infant days of Java a lot of people used to say that JAVA
stand for "Just Another Version of Ada"!)


> 
> > I counter case, usually used by Ada disgusters is the famous ESA Arianne
> > rocket, although programmed in Ada it made a very expensive piece of
> > hardware burn (literally!) due an error in design, notwitstanding the
> > supposed high quality language (and btw process) to build the softaware.
> >
> > Cesar
> 
> You can never eliminate human error or stupidity completely. I am sure many
> here on this news group could site "stupid Ada tricks" that are not the
> fault of the language or its tools, but of those USING the "tool". Kinda
> like the apprentice mechanic that uses a caliper as a C-clamp.
> 
> Your example is more the design/human-error type, which again, is not
> completely avoidable. At least you can say that Ada did exactly as it
> was told to do, when it burned it's hardware!  What more can you ask
> of a computer?

Again we are stuck with the "mental image". Ada "did not avoid" and it
is harder to learn, etc. (I'm not advocating this, please!). OTOH, Meyer
started to canvass the community about a new programming paradigm
("programming by contract") and it brand new language that supports this
(Eiffel), which again takes the focus out of Ada.


In a nutshell, I partially agree that to regain momentum (out of some
academic circles and specific niche markets). We need to get some
projects public interest and get them a feel of the advantages of "our"
programming environment.

The idea of games seems interesting, an OS seems to me too far fetching
(let alone FSF struggling to finish their GNU OS, a small community of
Ada programmers would be faster?). Other things we could try is to go
the FSF "todo/wishlist" and look for some production software FSF needs,
some of them although not as exciting as games or rocket control, are
still software engineering respectable projects, and if they catch the
user audience they rather be stable/robust. Two which I recall were
office related includind a general ledger program. I wonder if a Free
version of an ERP package wouldn't be more worth investing than a
competing OS.

[]


> Warren W. Gay VE3WWG

Cesar (PY2CSH)

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Cesar Scarpini Rabak]

Ted Dennison wrote:
> 
> In article <92vrkj$jh5$1@news-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>,
>   sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de (Georg Bauhaus) wrote:
> > Ted Dennison (dennison@telepath.com) wrote:
> >
> > : best inroads there, but I think a simultanious attack from multiple
> > : fronts might be most effective.
> >
> > Hm, attacking from multiple fronts has usually led
> > to death, starving, or surrender...Not to making someone
> > see ?
> 
> Well, its just a metaphor...

Metaphors explained, another issue (IMHO more relevant) is present
(written) FSF will (for the gory details, pls refer to the Using
Languages Other Than C node in the `info' "standards" document. In a
nutshell they encourage everybody to use C as much as possible (even C++
may be "inconvenient")!

A snippet of (more or less common) wisdom endorsed by FSF:

 "C has one other advantage over C++ and other compiled languages: more
people know C, so more people will find it easy to read and modify the
program if it is written in C."

I _really_ know better as my first advisor suggested I steered away from
a "too specific language" and implemented my MSc project in C/C++. . .

HTH

Cesar

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Warren W. Gay VE3WWG]

Cesar Scarpini Rabak wrote:
> "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" wrote:
> > Cesar Scarpini Rabak wrote:
> > > "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" wrote:
> > > [snipped]
> > > > First of all, I like the idea of the book. It should be written.
> > >
> > > A book! Let's start with an article and have it published in Dr. Dobbs's
> > > Mag first!
> > >
> > > just my .019...
> >
> > Articles are also fine ;-)
> 
> Great, lets see if we get enough material to pump a good one!
> Incidentally, Dr. Dobbs _did_ publish an article about GNAT some time
> ago (my personal library is all packed from a recent office moving and
> could not pinpoint in their site).

I missed that one (over a year ago?) I did see an article in the Linux
Journal, which was nice to see.

 > I'm not suggesting that the Ada95 language and/or compiler will solve all
> > security problems, or even reliability ones. But it does allow your CPU
> > to point out a lot of very common problems that lead to unreliable and/or
> > insecure programs. If you focus on all other aspects of security, as people
> > do when the write in C/C++/Java for example, then you leave unecessary
> > risks within the system. In a nutshell, Ada95 greatly improves the chances
> > of a program being correct, and less likely to be exploitable.
> 
> Agreed. But, again we're lost in the "mainstream" school of thought.
> Java advocates convinced the masses that the "only" dangerous feature of
> a nice language (C++) was pointers so they made an elegant one (only OO)
> w/o pointers... and rest is history. (Anedoctically  it can be added
> that in the infant days of Java a lot of people used to say that JAVA
> stand for "Just Another Version of Ada"!)

Besides doing our best to contribute in Ada code, I think the next best
thing is perhaps the "educational aspect", which I think you're hinting
at.

Anyway, I think some carefully constructed articles for various magazines
may help increase some interest. I think that one approach might be to
assume C++ knowledge, and show how things are done in Ada in comparison
fashion. While doing so, the article should quietly show why Ada95 does 
it better, of course.

I also think you need to do some comparisons of real-life programming in the
two languages. For example, show examples with records (possibly tagged)
with discrimants affecting the contained array bounds. This is one of the
ugliest problems in C/C++. Anyway, you can probably think of many more 
(I am just thinking out loud).

Other articles could take the "Why Ada?" approach. Perhaps sprinkled
with information about where Ada was, is today, and is likely to be in
the future. It seems that a lot of people have a number of pre-conceived
misconceptions about the language, and its design. I'm not sure that
surveys and studies are what readers want however (links to them would
be good for the curious of course).

A decade ago, compiler size was important on a 386. Disk space was low,
and PC CPUs were not fast. Apparently Linus Torvalds dropped the idea of 
using C++ for Linux, after a while. This was because gcc was too slow 
on the 386 at the time. Now, things are considerably different. Perhaps
this was a little short-sighted on his part.

I think that a few basic Ada "marketing" messages need to go out: 

  (1) the compiler size for Ada is no longer a problem. 
  (2) the compiler (GNAT) is available, and free.
  (3) Ada (95) is not obsolete, and supports OOP

Perhaps (2) will be an easier sell, once it is rolled in with gcc. Having
it already installed with new distributions will help it's cause greatly,
IMHO.

> > > I counter case, usually used by Ada disgusters is the famous ESA Arianne
> > > rocket, although programmed in Ada it made a very expensive piece of
> > > hardware burn (literally!) due an error in design, notwitstanding the
> > > supposed high quality language (and btw process) to build the softaware.
> >
> > You can never eliminate human error or stupidity completely. I am sure many
> > here on this news group could site "stupid Ada tricks" that are not the
> > fault of the language or its tools, but of those USING the "tool". Kinda
> > like the apprentice mechanic that uses a caliper as a C-clamp.
> >
> > Your example is more the design/human-error type, which again, is not
> > completely avoidable. At least you can say that Ada did exactly as it
> > was told to do, when it burned it's hardware!  What more can you ask
> > of a computer?
> 
> Again we are stuck with the "mental image". Ada "did not avoid" and it
> is harder to learn, etc. (I'm not advocating this, please!). OTOH, Meyer
> started to canvass the community about a new programming paradigm
> ("programming by contract") and it brand new language that supports this
> (Eiffel), which again takes the focus out of Ada.

I will agree that stepping into Ada, is not trivial (the basics are simple,
but there is a lot of familiarization required for the various Ada 
packages etc.)  There needs to be a new class of Ada95 books that take
the reader BEYOND the language and look at Ada95, using UNIX, and step
the reader through such issues as using Streams and other Ada specific
solutions.

I found the language easy enough to pick up. What wasn't found in existing
literature was the answers to such questions as:

   How do I read in structures from a file?
   How do I structure my project? My Makefile?
   How do I use shared libraries with GNAT?
   How should a main program be formed?
   How should I process command line arguments?
   How should I interface with various UNIX facilities? errno? signals?
   String handling (this is never adequately covered)

These are just a few. When the beginner goes to write a new Ada95
app, he knows how to do the basic language things. However, the
environment is very foreign to a UNIX/C type, and this is where all
of the literature I have seen, is found wanting.

> In a nutshell, I partially agree that to regain momentum (out of some
> academic circles and specific niche markets). We need to get some
> projects public interest and get them a feel of the advantages of "our"
> programming environment.
> 
> The idea of games seems interesting, an OS seems to me too far fetching
> (let alone FSF struggling to finish their GNU OS, a small community of
> Ada programmers would be faster?).

An OS, with its problems with getting driver support etc. is very ambitious.
For me, AdaOS is a wish list item, but I agree, that seeing it
completed doesn't seem likely, unless Ada participants should
suddenly rise.

> Other things we could try is to go
> the FSF "todo/wishlist" and look for some production software FSF needs,
> some of them although not as exciting as games or rocket control, are
> still software engineering respectable projects, and if they catch the
> user audience they rather be stable/robust. Two which I recall were
> office related includind a general ledger program. I wonder if a Free
> version of an ERP package wouldn't be more worth investing than a
> competing OS.
> Cesar (PY2CSH)

Because of concern about Internet security, I'd like to replace 
servers with ones written in Ada95, if time ever permits. Some 
immediate examples come to mind:

  - A better Linux DHCP client program (the C version I have installed
    is very problematic, and probably exploitable).
  - A replacement for DNS (Bind) in Ada95, possibly including
  - optional DHCP server (with dynamic DNS update)

OTOH, there are so many more interesting things to do... sigh.. like
applications that allow your host to do useful work for you. ;-)

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://members.home.net/ve3wwg

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Marin David Condic]

Cesar Scarpini Rabak wrote:

> In a nutshell, I partially agree that to regain momentum (out of some
> academic circles and specific niche markets). We need to get some
> projects public interest and get them a feel of the advantages of "our"
> programming environment.
>

Two things might help: One is more and better development tools. The other would
be if there was a large institution trying to push it for purposes of their own
"product distinction". Sun decided to push Java and to a large extent succeded in
gaining a large part of the market. If, for example, Compaq or IBM were to make
Ada an objective, they'd have enough marketing muscle to gain a nice chunk of
business.

Another problem still remains. Despite everyone's best efforts, there still
remains a lot of perception that Ada is "A Bad Thing" based on all sorts of
misconceptions and odd preferences on the part of many programmers. You just say
the name and you can draw sneers of derision from many people who couldn't even
recognize the syntax of the language if they saw it. Maybe a name change would
help? Make Ada0x become Augusta0x? "Hey! We have this whole brandy-new
programming language called 'Augusta' and it has a lot of spiffy features. Try it
out!"

>
> The idea of games seems interesting, an OS seems to me too far fetching
> (let alone FSF struggling to finish their GNU OS, a small community of
> Ada programmers would be faster?). Other things we could try is to go
> the FSF "todo/wishlist" and look for some production software FSF needs,
> some of them although not as exciting as games or rocket control, are
> still software engineering respectable projects, and if they catch the
> user audience they rather be stable/robust. Two which I recall were
> office related includind a general ledger program. I wonder if a Free
> version of an ERP package wouldn't be more worth investing than a
> competing OS.

ERP is beginning to fall out of vogue. While it still exists, b-school thinking
and management fad is that there are really only a handful of companies large
enough to benefit from it and that the dollars in vs dollars out just aren't
there to justify it.

An OS would be a good thing, but I think it will just take too long to get built.
It wouldn't hurt if it had a large corporate sponsor looking for that product
distinction again, but who would that be? The OS would have to have some
significant advantage over Windows or the computer makers will ignore it in favor
of the larger market. Personally, I'd like to see an OS that was capable of
running on a PC, but was suitable for realtime work. (Windows is not, which has
spawned a market for add-on products that make it usable in realtime.) If it came
in source code and modular pieces that made it easy to pick and choose what you
wanted for an embedded product, it would have an advantage in that it could run
on a PC where you could do your development & then have an easy path to the
embedded machine. (The sort of direction that Lynuxworks has gone in)

Business software may be a good idea, but most small businesses couldn't be
bothered with anything that isn't an off-the-shelf solution (well documented!)
and wouldn't want to spend any time customizing software. They either buy a box
full of accounting stuff and run with whatever it does or they outsource the job
to a big data processing firm.

Think about the things that are most frequently used and where having open source
code would be a big advantage. That's the sort of project that might make a good
market for Ada.

MDC
--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey
    and car keys to teenage boys."

        --   P. J. O'Rourke
======================================================================

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Marc A. Criley]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> Another problem still remains. Despite everyone's best efforts, there still
> remains a lot of perception that Ada is "A Bad Thing" based on all sorts of
> misconceptions and odd preferences on the part of many programmers. You just say
> the name and you can draw sneers of derision from many people who couldn't even
> recognize the syntax of the language if they saw it. Maybe a name change would
> help? Make Ada0x become Augusta0x? "Hey! We have this whole brandy-new
> programming language called 'Augusta' and it has a lot of spiffy features. Try it
> out!"

From time to time I've half-seriously toyed with the idea of defining a
programming language that was a thin facade over Ada and that had a
C/C++/Java flavor.  Y'know, braces, "throw" instead of "raise", making
procedure and function syntax conform to the C style, adding extensions
for defining range constraints and stuff in a way that maintained the C
look and so on.

It would then be a mechanical translation between "Augusta" and Ada, so
one could use GNAT to compile it, trapping any error messages and
translating them to Augusta terminology as well.

Now there's a language: Strongly typed, built in concurrency, rigorously
defined templates, strong support for system programming and
multi-language support, and you don't have to give up your knowledge of
C/C++/Java in order to use it!  :-)

Marc A. Criley
Senior Staff Engineer
Quadrus Corporation
www.quadruscorp.com

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Ted Dennison]

In article <3A53CB9E.EA7CF86C@uol.com.br>,
  Cesar Scarpini Rabak <csrabak@uol.com.br> wrote:

> The idea of games seems interesting, an OS seems to me too far
> fetching

Don't make the assumption that a game would be simpler than an OS, just
because its more fun or something. Today's popular games are *huge*
undertakings. There are some game projects out there that have slipped
schedules enough to make the DoD blanch.

Making something that someone would want to play these days also
involves a large amount of art work. Computer artists are not the type
of people who would care one way or the other about something like a
programming language. They'd have to be either paid, or somehow conviced
to do a lot of work for free for other reasons (portfolio-building would
probably be your best bet).

To give you a better idea of the relative size, the last 2 computer
games I bought came on 3 and 4 CD's respectively.

Not that this isn't a subject near and dear to my heart. I started
programming 20 years ago by fixing the bugs in my BASIC games. (Anyone
else here remember those books of type-in BASIC games?).

> (let alone FSF struggling to finish their GNU OS, a small
> community of Ada programmers would be faster?). Other things we could

If you read their version of things at GNU.org, the main holdups were
not technical, but rather licensing for the third-party microkernel they
wanted to use.

You can check this all out yourself at
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd-history.html .

> and if they catch the user audience they rather be stable/robust. Two
> which I recall were office related includind a general ledger program.
> I wonder if a Free version of an ERP package wouldn't be more worth
> investing than a competing OS.

Well, the most important thing I think is that projects get *done*. To
that end, folks should probably work on what they want to work on. If
you want to work on an ERP pacakge, please do!

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Ted Dennison]

In article <3A5466DE.811D43A5@acm.org>,
  Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org> wrote:
> remains a lot of perception that Ada is "A Bad Thing" based on all
> sorts of misconceptions and odd preferences on the part of many

I don't think that is really an insurmountable problem, as long as we
can somehow manage to start to get them while they're young. Sure, the
old-timers around them will persist in saying C/Fortran/Whatever is far
superior, but since when did a young developer seriously listen to an
old-timer? :-)

> Personally, I'd like to see an OS that was capable of running on a
> PC, but was suitable for realtime work. (Windows is not, which has
> spawned a market for add-on products that make it usable in
> realtime.) If it came in source code and modular pieces that made
> it easy to pick and choose what you wanted for an embedded product,
> it would have an advantage in that it could run on a PC where you
> could do your development & then have an easy path to the
> embedded machine. (The sort of direction that Lynuxworks has gone in)

I'm with you on that one. Two of the last 3 projects I worked on were
attempting to do real-time work on PC hardware. I think there is a
tremendous market out there (which is why there are so many different
efforts underway already).

For me, the current great hope is HURD. They claim that if you
substitute a real-time micorkernel for the non-realtime MACH, HURD will
become a full real-time platform, without having to write special
software and/or segregate the normal software off into some non-realtime
subsystem like happens with all the NT and Linux approaches. Supposedly
there are real-time MACH's around, so it ought to be doable.

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Kevin Rigotti]

Much as it pains me to say so, Ada is not always the most appropriate
language.

For example, however good the bindings, toolsets, etc that are available it
is simply easier and more convenient to write X Windows user interfaces in
C/C++ because that's what the  designers expected you to do.

Bindings and support for Gtk are a good thing, but at the end of the day
what I and others in a similar situation really want to do is to build the
clever stuff in Ada then hand it over for integration with someone elses
GUI, produced using whatever is cheapest and easiest.

I don't care if the trivial stuff is written in C, C++, Java or anything
else but I do care about integration costs, particularly if they are so
painful that I have to implement experiment critical code in a language I
consider inappropriate in order to reduce them.

So, the thing that would make the biggest impact on the uptake of Ada in my
environment at the moment is being able to mix and match Ada with C++
seamlessly, using whichever fitted the problem most cost effectively.

Doing this for compilers from the same family such as  GNAT and G++ is a
good start but only a serious standardisation effort is really going to have
the required impact and allow  Import(cpp, ...) to be taken for granted in
the way that Import(C, ...) now is.

We could then use the youngest, cheapest staff for the C++ hacking and when
they'd had time to learn what real software engineering was all about they
could move on to doing the important stuff in Ada.

People need upgrade paths too :-)

Kevin

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[n_brunot]

In article <932mi6$r2k$1@trog.dera.gov.uk>,
  "Kevin Rigotti" <rigotti@atc.dera.gov.uk> wrote:
> Bindings and support for Gtk are a good thing, but at the end of the day
> what I and others in a similar situation really want to do is to build the
> clever stuff in Ada then hand it over for integration with someone elses
> GUI, produced using whatever is cheapest and easiest.

I agree.
I recently looked at some Gtk sources to see how Win32 fonts were
implemented.
(This is not a criticism of Gtk, which is an excellent library)
I noticed the same thing in a lot of C libraries interfaced in Ada.
And we often had to do it in our code.

A very huge part of those packages is simply writing specifications, and
pragma import ...
Which requires some work in Ada, while you would have absolutely nothing
to do in C.
This is of very high cost.

Ada83 made the enormous mistake to lack a pragma export, denying the
importance and justification of others languages.
May be one of the biggest problem of Ada95, is the work required to
interface a simple C library.
This should be made much more automatic by the language or by
appropriate tools.
This is not the case today.
Take a C library, write a simple program to test it in Ada, and the same
in C.
It's the better way to understand what should be done to see Ada more
widely used.










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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Tarjei T. Jensen]

n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote
>A very huge part of those packages is simply writing specifications, and
>pragma import ...
>Which requires some work in Ada, while you would have absolutely nothing
>to do in C.
>This is of very high cost.

Which you recouperate during development and debugging. It looks like overhead,
but is really an investment which pays off handsomely when you use them. The
bindings insure that you are using the interface correct. This is something you
can't get with the standard C header files.

C header files tend to contain only so much information that the source
compiles. It creates a lot of opportunity for problems which are more costly
than writing a Ada or Delphi binding.

Greetings,

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[n_brunot]

In article <9345qu$8r76@news.kvaerner.com>,
  "Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com> wrote:
>
> n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote
> >A very huge part of those packages is simply writing specifications, and
> >pragma import ...
> >Which requires some work in Ada, while you would have absolutely nothing
> >to do in C.
> >This is of very high cost.
>
> Which you recouperate during development and debugging. It looks like
overhead,
> but is really an investment which pays off handsomely when you use them.

That's usually right, and especially for big projects.
But nevertheless, this is a lengthy and tedious work, where mistakes can
be made.
For a lot of small applications, the cost keep most programmers away
from Ada and the investment is globally negative.

Like in any field, you should be able to choose an extremely easy but
less reliable way to program (this wouldn't be worse than C) and a more
complex and more reliable way to program.
The problem is that the easy way is today impossible.

Don't forget that if the basic component is in C, you won't make it more
reliable because you interfaced it in Ada ...
A lot of C components are extremely useful, and an immediate way to use
them would not make any harm.

Anyway nothing can justify that this work is not at least extremely easy
and made with a standard tool or feature of the language.
The benefits would be the same.
The cost would nearly disappear.

This shows up as soon as a great part of your work is interfacing
existing C libraries, and this is an enormous problem for the spreading
of Ada.
Most available components are in C, and it would be a nonsense to wait
for their Ada version before you can use them easily.



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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Cesar Scarpini Rabak]

Ted Dennison wrote:
> 
> In article <3A53CB9E.EA7CF86C@uol.com.br>,
>   Cesar Scarpini Rabak <csrabak@uol.com.br> wrote:
> 
> > The idea of games seems interesting, an OS seems to me too far
> > fetching
> 
> Don't make the assumption that a game would be simpler than an OS, just
> because its more fun or something. Today's popular games are *huge*
> undertakings. There are some game projects out there that have slipped
> schedules enough to make the DoD blanch.

I did not mean this, but rather if we could 'prove' we can do game
programming in Ada easier/better, it would be (probably) easier to
attract more programmers (specially hobbists which eventually would turn
in professionals) to Ada.

Game programming today is indeed a very complex and competive packages
now require much more than a thousand person-hours of programming to get
them done!

OTOH, if we get a popular game written in Ada (be it
free/shareware/commercial) it would help the spreading of the language.

Cesar

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <9343b1$3g5$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> Ada83 made the enormous mistake to lack a pragma export,
> denying the importance and justification of others languages.

A peculiar statement since

a) this is fixed in Ada 95

b) Ada 83 already went FAR further than other languages in
accomodating "the importance and justification of other[s]
languages". Someone once asked how to interface a COBOL and
C program (on comp.lang.ada) in a portable manner. I answered
that this could not be done directly (and that is still true
today). I added that the ONLY portable way to do this was to
write an Ada driver that would interface to COBOL and C using
the Ada features.

> May be one of the biggest problem of Ada95, is the work
> required to interface a simple C library.

> This should be made much more automatic by the language or by
> appropriate tools.

Hard to see how the language could make this more automatic,
and the demand for tools in this area has not materialized (in
our experience, for users of GNAT Professional, this is not the
"biggest problem" for most of them).

> This is not the case today.
> Take a C library, write a simple program to test it in Ada,
> and the same in C.

Well of course you have an easier time interfacing to a library
written in language X from language X.

Try another experiment, take a library written in Ada for use
by Ada programs, and try to interface to it from C. This is
in fact impossible, because C has no provision for interfacing
to foreign languages at all.

Now of course, since Ada has very good facilities in this area,
you can write your library (using pragma Export (C ...)) so
that it can be called by C, but all the burden on interlanguage
communication is assumed by Ada, since C is completely
incompetent in this area.

If any language here fails to recognize the importance of
other languages it is C, not Ada!




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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[n_brunot]

In article <934iuf$eqv$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <9343b1$3g5$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,

> b) Ada 83 already went FAR further than other languages in
> accomodating "the importance and justification of other[s]
> languages".

Exact, but in a single direction which is the basic problem with
dramatic consequences. As you said, this was (lately) corrected in Ada95

> I added that the ONLY portable way to do this was to
> write an Ada driver that would interface to COBOL and C using
> the Ada features.

This is one of the portable way. a way is the ONLY way only until
someone find an other one ...
Java impose the basic type sizes for good reasons ...

> Hard to see how the language could make this more automatic,
> and the demand for tools in this area has not materialized (in
> our experience, for users of GNAT Professional, this is not the
> "biggest problem" for most of them).

From what I know, they usually deal with big projects, and a very small
portion of their code consists in pragma import.
I mean comparing with what is done in more usual development that is
done in C or in Java.
So they fall completely out the field I was talking about, and this is
indeed no big deal for them.
Companies developping products making a very wide use of C libraries
don't use Ada, and therefore don't use or care about any Ada compiler.

> Try another experiment, take a library written in Ada for use
> by Ada programs, and try to interface to it from C. This is
> in fact impossible, because C has no provision for interfacing
> to foreign languages at all.

Absolutely true. just one little problem :
99% of softwares (I may be optimistic) don't use Ada and don't care
about Ada components, so this is not a big problem for them.
That's why pragma export was so important.

> Now of course, since Ada has very good facilities in this area,
> you can write your library (using pragma Export (C ...)) so
> that it can be called by C, but all the burden on interlanguage
> communication is assumed by Ada, since C is completely
> incompetent in this area.
>
> If any language here fails to recognize the importance of
> other languages it is C, not Ada!

Which is of absolutely no importance for other languages since they rule
the market
They don't have to become popular (they are already) while Ada has too.
So whatever can be thought about it, Ada must improve ease of use with
other languages without caring if others languages care about Ada.



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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen]

Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> writes:

> In article <9343b1$3g5$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> > Ada83 made the enormous mistake to lack a pragma export,
> > denying the importance and justification of others languages.
> 
> A peculiar statement since
> 
> a) this is fixed in Ada 95
> 
> b) Ada 83 already went FAR further than other languages in
> accomodating "the importance and justification of other[s]
> languages". Someone once asked how to interface a COBOL and
> C program (on comp.lang.ada) in a portable manner. I answered
> that this could not be done directly (and that is still true
> today). I added that the ONLY portable way to do this was to
> write an Ada driver that would interface to COBOL and C using
> the Ada features.
> 
> > May be one of the biggest problem of Ada95, is the work
> > required to interface a simple C library.
> 
> > This should be made much more automatic by the language or by
> > appropriate tools.
> 
> Hard to see how the language could make this more automatic,
> and the demand for tools in this area has not materialized (in
> our experience, for users of GNAT Professional, this is not the
> "biggest problem" for most of them).
> 

But it may be perceived as a problem for those who do NOT use Ada, for
various reasons. 
Btw., c2ada shows that the automatic generation of thin bindings is indeed
feasible, but the c2ada implementation lacks a lot in terms of stability.

> > This is not the case today.
> > Take a C library, write a simple program to test it in Ada,
> > and the same in C.
> 
> Well of course you have an easier time interfacing to a library
> written in language X from language X.
> 
> Try another experiment, take a library written in Ada for use
> by Ada programs, and try to interface to it from C. This is
> in fact impossible, because C has no provision for interfacing
> to foreign languages at all.
> 
> Now of course, since Ada has very good facilities in this area,
> you can write your library (using pragma Export (C ...)) so
> that it can be called by C, but all the burden on interlanguage
> communication is assumed by Ada, since C is completely
> incompetent in this area.
> 
> If any language here fails to recognize the importance of
> other languages it is C, not Ada!
> 
> 

Certainly, but given that so many libraries are available with a C
interface, this is not a problem for C users.

> 
> 
> Sent via Deja.com
> http://www.deja.com/

It seems to me that your position is that lack of bindings to foreign
libraries is not a problem, since you do not see any demand for tools.
I hope you are right, but I do not believe so.

-- 
Kabelsalat ist gesund.

Ole-Hj. Kristensen

Object naming conventions (was: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software?)

[Kevin Rigotti]

I really don't think that there is a problem at the source code level. I
would strongly agree with Robert Dewar that Ada provides far more support
for multi-language programming than any other language.

The first thing I wrote in Ada95 a few years back was to extend a version of
"rpcgen" to produce Ada stubs for a distributed simulation platform written
in C, and it was easier and cleaner with Ada95 than it would have been in
Ada83 or anything else.

Where things tend to get a bit mucky at the moment is the object code level.
Interfacing to C is easy because it only has one level at which to define
external symbols, so the names are predictable. Once you have nesting of
various kinds then the names become very compiler dependent, which makes it
a real pain in the neck to call out to C++ from Ada or vice versa, which is
what a lot of people would like to be able to do (getting back to the point
of my earlier posting).

GNAT is well behaved in its choice of names, for example a procedure Reset
in package Cactus.Random becomes "cactus__random__reset". Nothing surprising
there.

Compare that to "_R_reset.random.cactus.9dmo0dr4xkkbonjxay" for the same
thing compiled with Rational Apex and its no surprise that interoperability
can sometimes be a problem.

Rather than constructing elaborate wish lists for "Ada0X" I would far rather
see any spare energy that folks here in c.l.a have going into resolving
practical issues of this sort.

How hard can it be to standardise a naming convention  ?

Kevin

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <934kt2$gbh$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> Exact, but in a single direction which is the basic problem
> with dramatic consequences. As you said, this was (lately)
> corrected in Ada95

But there were equivalents of pragma Export in all Ada 83
implementations, so in practice this was not a major problem
in Ada 83. Sure it is nice to make it portable, and that
was the reason this features was standardized in Ada 95.


> > I added that the ONLY portable way to do this was to
> > write an Ada driver that would interface to COBOL and C
> > using the Ada features.
>
> This is one of the portable way. a way is the ONLY way only
> until someone find an other one ...

Nope, it is the ONLY portable way, then and now.

> Java impose the basic type sizes for good reasons ...

This is not relevant. it has to do only with portability of
Java code, not with interfacing Java with other languages.

Furthermore, there are severe performance penalties in the
Java approach, so severe in practice that the normal approach
on the x86, where the fpt rules of Java are a disaster, is
simply to ignore these rules, and do floating-point operations
in a manner that is not comaptible with the Java rules.

> From what I know, they usually deal with big projects, and a
> very small portion of their code consists in pragma import.

Well you don't know enough, and that is false :-)

> I mean comparing with what is done in more usual development
> that is done in C or in Java.

Sounds like you have a rather narrow view, especially if you
lump C and Java together in this respect.

> So they fall completely out the field I was talking about,

No they don't.

> Companies developping products making a very wide use of C
> libraries don't use Ada,

A false generalization, there are many exceptions.



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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <umq1yuixba0.fsf@maestro.clustra.com>,
  Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen <ohk@clustra.com> wrote:
> Btw., c2ada shows that the automatic generation of thin
> bindings is indeed feasible, but the c2ada implementation
> lacks a lot in terms of stability.

Yes, interestingly there seems to be very little demand for
working on this kind of tool. At one point Ada Core
Technologies had a fairly high priority project to adapt the
SGI binding generator (which is far more advanced and robust
than c2ada, and also handles C++) for general use (it currently
uses a proprietary C++ front end), but there simply has not
been any significant demand for this tool, so the priority
of the project got reduced, and many more important tasks
are ahead of it at this stage.

> It seems to me that your position is that lack of bindings to
> foreign libraries is not a problem, since you do not see any
> demand for tools. I hope you are right, but I do not believe
> so.


It is a problem, but I don't think it is a blocking problem to
the use of Ada in most cases.

Through the history of Ada we have had people saying

"If only we did X, then Ada would be more widely used"

But most of these claims have proved experimentally false, and
I think this is another such case. If someone produced a much
improved c2ada, I doubt this would suddenly make Ada popular.

Indeed, most of the small scale development of which N.Brunot
talks about is done in Windows environments, and here the
issue is not translation of C headers, it is automatic binding
to type libraries. I think the gnatcom approach is FAR more
interesting, valuable, and promising in this context, since
it allows for automatic reliable generation of thick Ada
bindings from language independent specifications (it is
quite fortunate that Visual Basic is so much more widely
used than C, since it means that Microsoft has to take a
language independent approach, and Ada is quite happy to
take a place at the table).


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Re: Object naming conventions (was: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software?)

[Robert Dewar]

In article <9356q9$ig9$1@trog.dera.gov.uk>,
  "Kevin Rigotti" <rigotti@atc.dera.gov.uk> wrote:

> GNAT is well behaved in its choice of names, for example a
> procedure Reset in package Cactus.Random becomes
> "cactus__random__reset". Nothing surprising
> there.

Unfortunately it is not quite that simple. First, overloading
obviously introduces additional problems.

Second, and more subtly, in Ada 95, it is possible to have
two different non-overloadable entities, both of which have
the name a.b.c, for example, you can have two variables in
a program which have this same fully qualified name. It is
an excercise for the reader to figure out how (for the answer
see exp_dbug.ads in the GNAT sources).

So naming conventions are a little tricky. GNAT goes to great
efforts to make the names transparent so that debugging with
non-Ada aware debuggers (such as are likely to be available
in hardware emulators) is reasonably practical (the other
naming scheme would indeed be a bit hostile in this context!).

For full details on the GNAT naming scheme, which also includes
details of the encodings GNAT uses to present full Ada
information using system standard debugging formats, see
the source of Exp_Dbug in file exp_dbug.ads.


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Lao Xiao Hai]

Cesar Scarpini Rabak wrote:

> Great, lets see if we get enough material to pump a good one!
> Incidentally, Dr. Dobbs _did_ publish an article about GNAT some time
> ago (my personal library is all packed from a recent office moving and
> could not pinpoint in their site).

In discussions with the Editor of Dr. Dobbs a couple of years ago, he indicated
an interest in publishing articles related to Ada when those articles would be
of interest to the wider audience of Dr. Dobbs readers.    He has no interest in
publishing cheerleading articles about Ada,  comparisons between Ada and some
other language, or general information about the language.

If you have an idea for an article that 1) contains something newsworthy (such as

about GNAT or CLAW),  2) covers some unique application that just happens to use
Ada but has broader implications for the software development community (such as
the Boeing 777,  or air traffic control), 3) describes a solution to a problem
that is of
interest to both Ada and non-Ada programmers, then you should submit a proposal
for that
article to the Editor.

Be aware that the responsibility of the Editor is to the readership of the
journal.  Controversy
is usually welcome.   Technical credibility is essential.  Evangelism is
unpopular.   Be prepared
to be rejected it your article is a blatant attempt to proselytize.

Richard Riehle

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Lao Xiao Hai]

"Marc A. Criley" wrote:

> From time to time I've half-seriously toyed with the idea of defining a
> programming language that was a thin facade over Ada and that had a
> C/C++/Java flavor.  Y'know, braces, "throw" instead of "raise", making
> procedure and function syntax conform to the C style, adding extensions
> for defining range constraints and stuff in a way that maintained the C
> look and so on.

Congratulations!  You've just invented C#.    :-)


Richard Riehle

Re: What to Do? Silly Valley

[Lao Xiao Hai]

One of the organiztions in Silicon Valley that gave support to the local
SigAda Chapter was Rational which is based in Santa Clara.   They used
to provide meeting space for us.   Also, certain units of Lockheed-Martin
were willing to let us use their meeting areas.  My guess is that United Defense,
currently an active user of Ada, would also be willing to host a meeting now
and then.

If the meeting notice is submitted eary enough to the San Jose Mercury News,
it will be published in the Computing Section in advance of the meeting.  If
anyone from Rational is listening to this forum, perhaps they would be willing
to offer their facility for the first meeting.

When Tyler Sperry was editor of Embedded Systems Programming Magazine,
he supported our efforts to combine one of our monthly meetings with the SF
Bay Area Embedded Systems Conference.

At present, none of the SF Bay Area Colleges and Universitites (except NPS) still
teaches Ada so we cannot expect much support from that group.   However, a few
professors are open-minded enough to consider attending a SigAda meeting now and
then.

Perhaps Tucker would consider being the inaugural speaker for a resurrected SigAda

in the Bay Area.

I am a past Chairperson of the Chapter.  The nomimal current Chair is Greg Downing
who
used to work at Rational.   Greg is now working elsewhere.   I don't recall who
the Treasurer
was, but there was a couple of hundred dollars in the treasury at the last report
I recall.

Running this kind of organization will require commitment and energy.   We need
someone with
the support of her/his company to do the job.  Otherwise it will simply fade into
obscurity again.

There are still people using Ada in the SF Bay Area who would be interested.
There are also
quite a few who are curious about Ada.    This would be a good time to act.
Now, the question.
Who will take charge and make sure this all comes together?

Richard Riehle

William Dale wrote:

> The ACM SIGAda Bay Area Chapter has been dormant for quite a while.  I
> have an action to help revive it sometime before the LinuxWorld Expo in
> August 2001 here in San Jose.
>
> If anyone would like to get involved here in Silly Valley please let me
> know. I hope to hold a BOF at the LinuxWorld Expo event to get it kicked
> off?  A meeting sooner would be possible as well.
>
> JF Harrison wrote:
> >
> > > Maybe we need a Silly Valley Ada Users Group?
> > >
> > > -- Brian (in Santa Clara, the belly of the beast)
> >
> > I'd join.  Still learning Ada, but isnt that part of what a club/users group
> > is all about?
> > -JF in San Francisco
>
> William Dale
> "Ada has made you lazy and careless.
> You can write programs in C that are just as safe
> by the simple application of super-human diligence."
> mailto:william.dale.jr+adanews@lmco.com
> mailto:n2rhv+adanews@arrl.net

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[n_brunot]

In article <937jvn$si3$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:

> > This is one of the portable way. a way is the ONLY way only
> > until someone find an other one ...
>
> Nope, it is the ONLY portable way, then and now.

Most people who find interesting new things are the ones who don't trust
this kind of assertion :-)

> Furthermore, there are severe performance penalties in the
> Java approach, so severe in practice that the normal approach
> on the x86, where the fpt rules of Java are a disaster, is
> simply to ignore these rules, and do floating-point operations
> in a manner that is not comaptible with the Java rules.

This is very often used explanation ...
Ada detractors used exactly the same not so long ago ...
And as far as ftp is concerned, let's not talk again about that for gnat ...
there is enough in threads archives ...


> > From what I know, they usually deal with big projects, and a
> > very small portion of their code consists in pragma import.
>
> Well you don't know enough, and that is false :-)
>
> > I mean comparing with what is done in more usual development
> > that is done in C or in Java.
>
> Sounds like you have a rather narrow view, especially if you
> lump C and Java together in this respect.
>

> > So they fall completely out the field I was talking about,
>
> No they don't.

I you say so, it must obviously be true ... :-)
By the way, we can wonder if you have any idea of non Ada developments
which are (from what I now ...) quite common in software programing.

> > Companies developping products making a very wide use of C
> > libraries don't use Ada,
>
> A false generalization, there are many exceptions.

And as usual, exceptions confirm the rule :-)
The percentage of companies non using Ada is high enough just to make
obvious the generalization.



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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[n_brunot]

In article <937kc7$ssq$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:

> Through the history of Ada we have had people saying
> "If only we did X, then Ada would be more widely used"
>
> But most of these claims have proved experimentally false, and
> I think this is another such case. If someone produced a much
> improved c2ada, I doubt this would suddenly make Ada popular.

I agree.
Experimentally, one must aknowledge that today Ada is far less popular
than other languages, even than much younger ones.
This will not suddenly and magically change without real questions and
answers about that.
Most explanations we read can unfortunately be summarized by :

"Ada is the best, the rest of the world should start to understand it"
followed by a bunch of technical justifications

This is the main thing that really experimentally proved to be totally
counterproductive, even if this is often true.
Only Ada users really care about those explanations.
So the result is that Ada users keep convincing one another that they
made the best choice.
This is totally useless since they are already convinced.
The only consequence is that this keep us blind at the fact that we
haven't the slightest chance to promote Ada with this attitude.

Anybody who talked about Ada to software people not using Ada (which are
unfortunately everything but a minority) knows that the usual answer is :
"Ada ? this still exists ???"

> Indeed, most of the small scale development of which N.Brunot
> talks about is done in Windows environments, and here the
> issue is not translation of C headers.

Not exactly. This is quite restrictive. Most components we use are
available for Win32 and Unix.
Especially because of linux, a very great number of available libraries
are now ported for non Win32 platform.



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Re: What to Do? Silly Valley

[William Dale]

All good information.  
At this point I'm sure Lockheed nor even Rational will put too much
support behind Ada of SIGAda.  I'm not sure I am available to help too
much more that assisting with a few meetings a year and getting better
visibility at Linux conferences. 

My fear is that soon everyone will be switching to C# -- even outside of
Microsoft systems. 

Lao Xiao Hai wrote:
> 
> One of the organiztions in Silicon Valley that gave support to the local
> SigAda Chapter was Rational which is based in Santa Clara.   They used
> to provide meeting space for us.   Also, certain units of Lockheed-Martin
> were willing to let us use their meeting areas.  My guess is that United Defense,
> currently an active user of Ada, would also be willing to host a meeting now
> and then.
> 
> If the meeting notice is submitted eary enough to the San Jose Mercury News,
> it will be published in the Computing Section in advance of the meeting.  If
> anyone from Rational is listening to this forum, perhaps they would be willing
> to offer their facility for the first meeting.
> 
> When Tyler Sperry was editor of Embedded Systems Programming Magazine,
> he supported our efforts to combine one of our monthly meetings with the SF
> Bay Area Embedded Systems Conference.
> 
> At present, none of the SF Bay Area Colleges and Universitites (except NPS) still
> teaches Ada so we cannot expect much support from that group.   However, a few
> professors are open-minded enough to consider attending a SigAda meeting now and
> then.
> 
> Perhaps Tucker would consider being the inaugural speaker for a resurrected SigAda
> 
> in the Bay Area.
> 
> I am a past Chairperson of the Chapter.  The nomimal current Chair is Greg Downing
> who
> used to work at Rational.   Greg is now working elsewhere.   I don't recall who
> the Treasurer
> was, but there was a couple of hundred dollars in the treasury at the last report
> I recall.
> 
> Running this kind of organization will require commitment and energy.   We need
> someone with
> the support of her/his company to do the job.  Otherwise it will simply fade into
> obscurity again.
> 
> There are still people using Ada in the SF Bay Area who would be interested.
> There are also
> quite a few who are curious about Ada.    This would be a good time to act.
> Now, the question.
> Who will take charge and make sure this all comes together?
> 
> Richard Riehle
> 
> William Dale wrote:
> 
> > The ACM SIGAda Bay Area Chapter has been dormant for quite a while.  I
> > have an action to help revive it sometime before the LinuxWorld Expo in
> > August 2001 here in San Jose.
> >
> > If anyone would like to get involved here in Silly Valley please let me
> > know. I hope to hold a BOF at the LinuxWorld Expo event to get it kicked
> > off?  A meeting sooner would be possible as well.
> >
> > JF Harrison wrote:
> > >
> > > > Maybe we need a Silly Valley Ada Users Group?
> > > >
> > > > -- Brian (in Santa Clara, the belly of the beast)
> > >
> > > I'd join.  Still learning Ada, but isnt that part of what a club/users group
> > > is all about?
> > > -JF in San Francisco
> >
> > William Dale
> > "Ada has made you lazy and careless.
> > You can write programs in C that are just as safe
> > by the simple application of super-human diligence."
> > mailto:william.dale.jr+adanews@lmco.com
> > mailto:n2rhv+adanews@arrl.net

Re: What to Do? Silly Valley

[Florian Weimer]

William Dale <william.dale.jr+adanews@lmco.com> writes:

> My fear is that soon everyone will be switching to C# -- even outside of
> Microsoft systems. 

Yes, like everyone switching to Java -- even on non-Sun systems. ;-)

BTW, there was an article on C# and .NET in the German version of
Microsoft System Journal which contained a strange reference to Ada
(something like 'a new language which also employs range checking on
integers')...

Re: What to Do? Silly Valley

[Florian Weimer]

William Dale <william.dale.jr+adanews@lmco.com> writes:

> My fear is that soon everyone will be switching to C# -- even outside of
> Microsoft systems. 

Yes, like everyone switching to Java -- even on non-Sun systems. ;-)

BTW, there was an article on C# and .NET in the German version of
Microsoft System Journal which contained a strange reference to Ada
(something like 'a new language which also implements range checking
on integers')...

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Cesar Scarpini Rabak]

n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> 
> In article <937kc7$ssq$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> 
> > Through the history of Ada we have had people saying
> > "If only we did X, then Ada would be more widely used"
> >
> > But most of these claims have proved experimentally false, and
> > I think this is another such case. If someone produced a much
> > improved c2ada, I doubt this would suddenly make Ada popular.
> 
> I agree.
> Experimentally, one must aknowledge that today Ada is far less popular
> than other languages, even than much younger ones.
> This will not suddenly and magically change without real questions and
> answers about that.
> Most explanations we read can unfortunately be summarized by :
> 
> "Ada is the best, the rest of the world should start to understand it"
> followed by a bunch of technical justifications
> 
> This is the main thing that really experimentally proved to be totally
> counterproductive, even if this is often true.
> Only Ada users really care about those explanations.
> So the result is that Ada users keep convincing one another that they
> made the best choice.
> This is totally useless since they are already convinced.
> The only consequence is that this keep us blind at the fact that we
> haven't the slightest chance to promote Ada with this attitude.
> 
> Anybody who talked about Ada to software people not using Ada (which are
> unfortunately everything but a minority) knows that the usual answer is :
> "Ada ? this still exists ???"
> 

Worse! Research firms like Gartner Group and its peers classify Ada as a
"mature" language "not recommended" for new projects. . . the next stage
is "obsolecent" when they recommend the substitution of the program or
rewrite in another language. It should come in 3 to 5 years!

Cesar

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[DuckE]

> Anybody who talked about Ada to software people not using Ada (which are
> unfortunately everything but a minority) knows that the usual answer is :
> "Ada ? this still exists ???"
>

This has not been my experience.  The response I usually hear is:

  What's Ada?


SteveD

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <93bv37$43b$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> > Nope, it is the ONLY portable way, then and now.
>
> Most people who find interesting new things are the ones who
> don't trust this kind of assertion :-)

Well the assertion happens to be correct in this case (and
no one has shown any specific data to claim otherwise).

> This is very often used explanation ...
> Ada detractors used exactly the same not so long ago ...
> And as far as ftp is concerned, let's not talk again about
> that for gnat ...
> there is enough in threads archives ...

You are completely missing the technical point here. We are
not talking about inefficient code generation, but rather a
fundamental technical issue that causes fpt code on the x86
to be seriously inefficient (by a factor of many) because
the Java spec requires checking ranges on all intermediate
results. This is very expensive, since the only way to do
this is to store every intermediate result in memory.

This is widely recognized as a flaw in the Java spec. My PhD
student Sam Figueroa, who now works at Apple, examined this
problem in detail in his recent NYU thesis. It is interesting
that the design of the ia64 floating-point unit is identical
to that of the ia32, with one exception, namely a new feature
that allows Java to be implemented efficiently.

Requiring bit-for-bit floating-point identical results sounds
good, but is far from easy to achieve.

By the way, in a recent benchmark done by one of our customers
GNAT outran a competitive compiler on Whetstones by a factor
of 2 (so I guess people's milage varies when it comes to GNAT
fpt performance). However, this is really not a relevant
comparison. In the case of Java we are talking about a
*language* feature that makes efficient fpt impossible. In
Ada, there is nothing in the language that requires inefficient
floating-point. Although it is true that the accuracy and error
checking requirements make the standard Ada generic elementary
functions package a little slower than other libraries which
do not check -- but then if this is a concern you can simply
use those other libraries.

> If you say so, it must obviously be true ... :-)

I am just reporting on our experience with users of GNAT
Professional.

> By the way, we can wonder if you have any idea of non Ada
> developments which are (from what I now ...) quite common in
> software programing.

Of the million+ lines of commercial code I have delivered in
the last 20 years on projects written just by me, only a small
fraction was in Ada, so yes, I am familiar with other languages
and what goes on in large scale software projects in all sorts
of environments.

> > A false generalization, there are many exceptions.
>
> And as usual, exceptions confirm the rule :-)
> The percentage of companies non using Ada is high enough just
> to make obvious the generalization.

Your generalization was about Ada programs as I read it, so I
do not understand that (by the way, you have garbled the idiom
here, it is "exceptions prove the rule", and the word prove
here means "test" not "proof" as in mathematics. In other
words, this idiom means that you test rules by looking for
counterexamples -- well I will have to file this along with
other entertaining "round-trip idioms" -- my favorite was
someone from France announcing that a particular task was
easy --- "a slice of pie" -- from that day on in Alsys, all
sorts of simple tasks were referred to as a "slice of pie" :-)



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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <93c0e9$4u6$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <937kc7$ssq$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
>
> > Through the history of Ada we have had people saying
> > "If only we did X, then Ada would be more widely used"
> >
> > But most of these claims have proved experimentally false,
and
> > I think this is another such case. If someone produced a
> > much improved c2ada, I doubt this would suddenly make Ada
> > popular.
>
> I agree.
> Experimentally, one must aknowledge that today Ada is far
> less popular
> than other languages, even than much younger ones.

No, that's an absurd statement unless you insert "some" before
the word other in the above statement. Yes, there are languages
that are more popular. I would suspect that COBOL still heads
the list, with Visual Basic a runner up, followed by C, C++,
Java etc.

But there are many languages around, hundreds of them, and
Ada is far MORE popular than many of them (what's the last
time you saw a new project started in Jovial).

> This will not suddenly and magically change without real
> questions and answers about that.

It wil not suddently and magically change period. I think it
quite unlikely that Ada will become super popular in the
future. Anyone who counts on that is deluding themselves.

> Most explanations we read can unfortunately be summarized by
> "Ada is the best, the rest of the world should start to
> understand it" followed by a bunch of technical
> justifications
>
> This is the main thing that really experimentally proved to
> be totally counterproductive, even if this is often true.

Counterproductive -- I don't think so, most Ada users starting
new Ada projects today do so *precisely* because they think
that Ada is technically superior for the task at hand.

> Only Ada users really care about those explanations.
> So the result is that Ada users keep convincing one another
> that they made the best choice.

> This is totally useless since they are already convinced.

Useless to whom?

> The only consequence is that this keep us blind at the fact
> that we haven't the slightest chance to promote Ada with this
> attitude.

Unconvincing. Particularly since you don't provide any credible
alternative suggestions. At this stage there is no magic to
promote Ada I suspect, but so what?

> Anybody who talked about Ada to software people not using Ada
> (which are unfortunately everything but a minority) knows
> that the usual answer is: "Ada ? this still exists ???"

I would guess most people would say that about PL/1 also, but
so what? PL/1 is used in many projects today, and work on PL/1
compilers etc continues. There are even people (I believe we
saw one on CLA recently) who think that COBOL does not exist
any more.

> Not exactly. This is quite restrictive. Most components we
> use are available for Win32 and Unix.

OK, well that puts you in a minority position I think (unless
you are under the illusion that Unix is as widely used as
Win32).

> Especially because of linux, a very great number of available
> libraries are now ported for non Win32 platform.

Indeed, but a large number are not. I have not seen a
convincing port of Win32 to Unix yet (yes, I know people are
working on this, but it is far from being a reliable product).

There are many technologies that people assume have disappeared
because they are not dominant, but that's not the way the world
works. Just because more Toyota's are sold than BMW's does
not mean that BMW is out of business.

Volume is not everything :-)

Don't get me wrong, I would certainly be happy to see Ada more
widely used, and I would be delighted to see it really widely
used. That's one of the main reasons I promoted the GNAT
project in the first place.

But despite hints to the contrary in N. Brunot's message, I
don't think there is any magic method of making Ada successful.

Instead you look for little opportunities and take them one at
a time. I think the fact that GNOME may be distributed with
GvdAda is a very positive opportunity as an example. This will
probably be the most widely distributed Ada program, and what
is more encouraging is that the GNOME folks are very
encouraging and quite happy to see Ada components in the
system.

Another positive sign is that people are definitely
enthusiastic about seeing Ada become part of the mainstream
GCC system. Right now, the plan is to complete the GCC 3.0
distribution, and then follow up very shortly with a GCC 3.1
which will include many important improvements, including
Ultraspark support, and Ada. And what is particularly nice is
that it is someone NOT particularly associated with Ada who
expressed enthusiasm about this prospect on the gcc mailing
list today.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies




>
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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Florian Weimer]

Cesar Scarpini Rabak <csrabak@uol.com.br> writes:

> Worse! Research firms like Gartner Group and its peers classify Ada as a
> "mature" language "not recommended" for new projects. . .

And how are the languages called which are recommended for new
projects?  "Evolving"?

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[n_brunot]

In article <93e33l$tfu$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> But there are many languages around, hundreds of them, and
> Ada is far MORE popular than many of them (what's the last
> time you saw a new project started in Jovial).

I read a couple a times the word 'jovial' and thought it was a joke :-)
I guess you could be ready to invent your own language, used only by
you, to make proof that there are languages less popular than Ada ...
Easy way to prove almost any absurd assertion :-)

> Counterproductive -- I don't think so, most Ada users starting
> new Ada projects today do so *precisely* because they think
> that Ada is technically superior for the task at hand.

And they are often right, but that has nothing to do with the question.
That's true for every language. You'll always find someone choosing the
most obscure language, and convinced that this is the right choice.
The great feeling of being an unrecognized precursor, I guess ...

> But despite hints to the contrary in N. Brunot's message, I
> don't think there is any magic method of making Ada successful.

There is no magic method.
Sorry to confirm you that's usually true for almost everything.
Java popularity certainly comes from Sun support.
But one thing Sun certainly knew how to do, because it's a successfull
commercial company, is how to promote the language to convince people to
use it
Ada promotion is too often the despising attitude of arrogant people
teaching to others how stupid they are.

Choose some Ada books and some Java ones.
Have them read by someone who is neither Ada or Java fanatics.
Ask him what he thinks, and not what you would like to hear.
The conclusion is straightforward.

That's what keep companies away from Ada, much more than the language
itself.
They'll find a lot of Java programmers in any location, while it's much
harder to find an Ada programmer.



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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[n_brunot]

In article <93e2d1$spv$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:

> By the way, in a recent benchmark done by one of our customers
> GNAT outran a competitive compiler on Whetstones by a factor
> of 2 (so I guess people's milage varies when it comes to GNAT
> fpt performance).

I often saw benchmarks proving one thing, while others proved the opposite.
Global performance and efficiency of a software goes far beyond than
what's usually done in a benchmark.
It's amazing to see how someone can prove a compiler extremely efficient
for a specific task, and the opinion of the final user about the
application ....

> comparison. In the case of Java we are talking about a
> *language* feature that makes efficient fpt impossible.

I'm confident in Java to correct that, if users find it necessary,
without listening to you even if you claim it's impossible :-)

> Of the million+ lines of commercial code I have delivered in
> the last 20 years on projects written just by me, only a small
> fraction was in Ada, so yes, I am familiar with other languages
> and what goes on in large scale software projects in all sorts
> of environments.

I have more lines than that on the cvs extraction of my working PC :-)
And that's only Ada, and represents obsolutely nothing in software industry.
Language knowledge, one single people life code, and even a dozen of
large scale projects don't necessarely mean that you are not figuring
software industry to be what you would like, and not what it really is.

>(by the way, you have garbled the idiom
> here, it is "exceptions prove the rule", and the word prove
> here means "test" not "proof" as in mathematics.

I trust you for the idiom :-)
But, it was litteral translation from french, where (to my knowledge,
may be I'm wrong) it means that when you find a very small number of
exceptions to a rule, widely true otherwise, you'd better trust the rule
is most cases, rather than thinking you met an exception each time rule
goes against your convinctions.



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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[David Gillon]

n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> 
> In article <93e33l$tfu$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> > But there are many languages around, hundreds of them, and
> > Ada is far MORE popular than many of them (what's the last
> > time you saw a new project started in Jovial).
> 
> I read a couple a times the word 'jovial' and thought it was a joke :-)
> I guess you could be ready to invent your own language, used only by
> you, to make proof that there are languages less popular than Ada ...
> Easy way to prove almost any absurd assertion :-)

But in this case JOVIAL J73 was a major language used for a similar
problem domain to Ada. It was the primary language used for programming
USAF avionics projects and probably the most prominent of the languages
on the embedded side that DoD hoped to replace with the introduction of
Ada 83. Robert is perfectly correct in pointing out that no one starts
projects in JOVIAL any more, yet it was still a significant development
language within the last decade and products of that development are
still in their production phase (the Boeing C-17 airlifter for
instance). Ask around and you'll likely find most of the regulars here
worked on JOVIAL projects pre-Ada.

-- 


David Gillon
Process Control Team
Eurofighter FCS
Avionic Systems
BAE SYSTEMS Avionics
Rochester, Kent, UK

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Karel Thoenissen]

n_brunot@my-deja.com schreef:

> >(by the way, you have garbled the idiom
> > here, it is "exceptions prove the rule", and the word prove
> > here means "test" not "proof" as in mathematics.
>
> I trust you for the idiom :-)
> But, it was litteral translation from french, where (to my knowledge,
> may be I'm wrong) it means that when you find a very small number of
> exceptions to a rule, widely true otherwise, you'd better trust the rule
> is most cases, rather than thinking you met an exception each time rule
> goes against your convinctions.

Exactly the same thing in Dutch: 'uitzonderingen bevestigen de regel'
(exceptions _confirm_ the rule). To my knowledge and that of my dictionary this
is not taken from English. I took a look in my dictionary of proverbs, with
proverbal translations and explanations in each of these langauges:

Dutch     Uitzonderingen bevestigen de regel      => Geen regel zonder
uitzondeing
German  Ausnahmen best�tigen die Regel          => Keine Regel ohne Ausnahme
French    L' exception confirme la r�gle              => Pas de r�gle sans
exception
English    Exceptions prove the rule                    => There is no rule
without some exception

There is nothing round-trip here. Quite to the contrary, it is very likely that
the proverb came into English via French! And prove means to deliver proof.

--


Groeten, Karel Th�nissen

Hello Technologies develops high-integrity software for complex systems

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Marc A. Criley]

n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> 
> In article <93e33l$tfu$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> > But there are many languages around, hundreds of them, and
> > Ada is far MORE popular than many of them (what's the last
> > time you saw a new project started in Jovial).
> 
> I read a couple a times the word 'jovial' and thought it was a joke :-)
> I guess you could be ready to invent your own language, used only by
> you, to make proof that there are languages less popular than Ada ...
> Easy way to prove almost any absurd assertion :-)

Robert!  Robert!  I'll take this one!

JOVIAL is neither a joke language, nor one made up as an academic
exercise by Prof. Dewar or anyone else.

JOVIAL began to be used on US Air Force command and control systems in
the 1960s, and was mandated for all such systems in 1967, and thence
continued to be used throughout the 60s and 70s.  Among other systems,
software written in JOVIAL guided Patriot missiles during the Gulf war,
and flies in some of the B2 Bomber on-board systems.  My wife worked
with it a number of years ago, and observed that it does have some nice
features appropriate for its problem domain.

Marc A. Criley
Senior Staff Engineer
Quadrus Corporation
www.quadruscorp.com

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Marin David Condic]

I agree that it is unlikely, but stranger things have happened. Remember
that C was around for a very long time, hiding in dark corners of the
world, before it started becoming super popular. Circumstances came
about that got it in front of enough people to generate a critical mass
& the rest is history.

Could the same thing happen for Ada? I wouldn't hold my breath, but I
think it is possible.

MDC

Robert Dewar wrote:

> It wil not suddently and magically change period. I think it
> quite unlikely that Ada will become super popular in the
> future. Anyone who counts on that is deluding themselves.

--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

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    and car keys to teenage boys."

        --   P. J. O'Rourke
======================================================================

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Marin David Condic]

As a recovering Jovial programmer, I take exception to that. Jovial is very
real and was used in a number of defense projects (among other things,
obviously). I believe there exists somewhere a freely available Jovial
compiler that targets to the 1750a. It produced very efficient code for that
processor. (Of course, you probably would need to find a VAX/VMS platform to
run it on...)

I think the name stood for Jules Own Version of the International
Algorithmic Language.

MDC

n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:

> I read a couple a times the word 'jovial' and thought it was a joke :-)
> I guess you could be ready to invent your own language, used only by
> you, to make proof that there are languages less popular than Ada ...
> Easy way to prove almost any absurd assertion :-)

--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey
    and car keys to teenage boys."

        --   P. J. O'Rourke
======================================================================

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Marin David Condic]

Just for grins, go visit: http://www.wpafb.af.mil/jovial/jovialg.htm

MDC

Marin David Condic wrote:

> As a recovering Jovial programmer, I take exception to that. Jovial is very

--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey
    and car keys to teenage boys."

        --   P. J. O'Rourke
======================================================================

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <93eoku$cm2$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> I'm confident in Java to correct that, if users find it
> necessary, without listening to you even if you claim it's
> impossible :-)

Well it is certainly impossible with the current specification.
No one would disagree with this (it sounds like you do not even
understand the technical issue here, so I assume you are not
really disagreeing either). As to whether the Java spec can be
fixed, not at all clear. So far, the proposals to fix this have
been rejected. If you have a clever idea of how to fix this,
please speak up, otherwise your faith that this can be fixed is
rather unconvincing.

Of course Java runs fine on Suns, and perhaps in the long run
since it is becoming increasingly irrelevant on Windows
platforms, it really does not matter that it does not run
accurately on Windows.


> But, it was litteral translation from french, where (to my
knowledge,
> may be I'm wrong) it means that when you find a very small
number of
> exceptions to a rule, widely true otherwise, you'd better
trust the rule
> is most cases, rather than thinking you met an exception each
time rule
> goes against your convinctions.


Investigate:-) In English, most people also think, quite
wrongly, that this is what the saying means, because the use of
prove in the sense of test is obsolete.

After all an exception generally DISPROVES a rule, that is
what scientific progress is all about. One violation of a
theory in experiment is enough to reject the theory, or at
least require its refinement.


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <93eoku$cm2$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> But, it was litteral translation from french

By the way, what may be going on here, is that the French
phrase is derived from the misunderstanding of the english
phrase. Sort of like the term "english horn" for the
instrument, which comes from Cor Anglais, the only trouble
being that the Angl root here is about having an angled
mouthpiece rather than having anything to do with the english
:-)

(I wonder if Brussel Sprouts come from a similar confusion, but
perhaps not, perhaps this is just a Belgian joke :-)


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <93ekmo$a14$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <93e33l$tfu$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> I read a couple a times the word 'jovial' and thought it was
> a joke :-) I guess you could be ready to invent your own
> language, used only by you, to make proof that there are
> languages less popular than Ada ...
> Easy way to prove almost any absurd assertion :-)

My goodness, are you *REALLY* saying you have not heard of
JOVIAL? And it is you who claims *I* don't know anything about
what is going on???

I would have especially thought that any Ada aware person would
be familiar with JOVIAL since one of the major functions of
Ada was to replace what was at one time fairly wide spread
use of JOVIAL (= Jules Own Version of the International
Algorithmic Language -- a verion of Algol). Do a little
research here to find out just how amusing this ignorance is!


> Java popularity certainly comes from Sun support.

Well interestingly it is IBM that is taking the language
seriously, but that was not enough to make PL/1 universal,
and I don't think it will be enough now.

> But one thing Sun certainly knew how to do, because it's a
> successfull commercial company, is how to promote the
> language to convince people to use it.

Well perhaps you are too young to be really aware of the PL/1
experience, but that was pretty strong evidence that being a
successful commercial company (with orders of mangitude more
resources than Sun) is not by itself enough.

> Choose some Ada books and some Java ones.
> Have them read by someone who is neither Ada or Java
> fanatics. Ask him what he thinks, and not what you would like
> to hear. The conclusion is straightforward.

Well I do that all the time (remember I teach at NYU), so I
am quite familiar with people's reactions to this task. of
course it depends on the books, and part of the trouble with
Java books is that they are weighed down by a ton of very
disorganized libraries, so I am not sure that the observation
(which is that people find the Ada books easier) is a fair one.

Anyway, it sounds like you are saying that Java is just fine
for the kind of application you need to write, and that is
a perfectly reasonable statement to make. No one says that
everyone should use Ada for everything.


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <87y9wl3yyh.fsf@deneb.enyo.de>, Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> writes:
> Cesar Scarpini Rabak <csrabak@uol.com.br> writes:
> 
>> Worse! Research firms like Gartner Group and its peers classify Ada as a
>> "mature" language "not recommended" for new projects. . .
> 
> And how are the languages called which are recommended for new
> projects?  "Evolving"?

The proper terminology is:

	Immature

Certainly the people who decide that "mature" is "bad" are not required
to bring software development projects in on time.  Other terms might be:

	Unproven
	Not yet stable
	Experimental

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[n_brunot]

In article <93f73f$mt1$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> My goodness, are you *REALLY* saying you have not heard of
> JOVIAL? And it is you who claims *I* don't know anything about
> what is going on???
>
> I would have especially thought that any Ada aware person would
> be familiar with JOVIAL since one of the major functions of
> Ada was to replace what was at one time fairly wide spread
> use of JOVIAL (= Jules Own Version of the International
> Algorithmic Language -- a verion of Algol). Do a little
> research here to find out just how amusing this ignorance is!

Most programmers in the world have an Ada knowledge as limited as my
Jovial knowledge.
There is indeed a bunch of Ada programmers with several years practice
who hardly heard the word Jovial :-)
I also know some languages worldwide popular for the small group from
which they come, but strangely unknown almost everywhere else ...

I suggest you send questions to big software companies about Jovial to
amuse them :-)
The percentage of users of this kind of languages is not especially
high, and not especially growing :-)

The world is greater than you think, I even know software companies not
 aware of ACT existence, and you must have missed some things more
important than Jovial and currently going on ... :-))
Guess what ? few people are still using Intel 286 and a lot of software
companies don't support it any more !!!



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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen]

Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> writes:
> 
> 
> > But, it was litteral translation from french, where (to my
> knowledge,
> > may be I'm wrong) it means that when you find a very small
> number of
> > exceptions to a rule, widely true otherwise, you'd better
> trust the rule
> > is most cases, rather than thinking you met an exception each
> time rule
> > goes against your convinctions.
> 
> 
> Investigate:-) In English, most people also think, quite
> wrongly, that this is what the saying means, because the use of
> prove in the sense of test is obsolete.
> 
> After all an exception generally DISPROVES a rule, that is
> what scientific progress is all about. One violation of a
> theory in experiment is enough to reject the theory, or at
> least require its refinement.
> 
> 
> Sent via Deja.com
> http://www.deja.com/

Certainly, but in other languages, they saying is exactly the
opposite, namely that the exception is what proves the rule. And I do
not mean prove in the sense of test, but in the sense of making
certain.
Of course this saying is nonsense, but it actually goes like that.

-- 
Kabelsalat ist gesund.

Ole-Hj. Kristensen

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[n_brunot]

In article <93f73f$mt1$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
>Do a little research here to find out just how amusing this ignorance
is!

Well I followed your advice and found some reasons for my ignorance,
and guess we are far more than I thought in that case :-))

For those people here is what I found

- Jovial seems quite unknown outside embedded programing folks
- Quite a lot programmers (a mojority ?) including me weren't born at
Jovial greatest time :-)
- If you check http://www.xinotech.com/xino-jovial.html you'll find
some reasons not to loose too much time about Jovial future and
characteristics including :

<<
Emulation
This alternative extends the life of the legacy Jovial application but
with the following restrictions:

It requires that the application be maintained in Jovial, thus in turn
requiring the assistance of scarce Jovial developers, which is one of
the main motivations to move away from Jovial in the first place.

It requires the continuing use of Jovial compilers and Jovial
development tools. These tools are becoming more and more scarce and
this is in fact one of the reasons why migration away from Jovial is
becoming a pressing necessity.

Emulated systems will typically execute at one fifth the speed of a
native application, so for time-critical systems, this sacrifice in
speed may not be acceptable.

This option will restrict the functionality available from the newer
hardware platforms and software environments, as such functionality may
not be available to the programmer at the Jovial level, thus severely
crippling the modernization potential of the application.
>>

What about a Jovialurassic park script for Steven Spielberg :-)



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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[dmitry6243]

In article <93f73f$mt1$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <93ekmo$a14$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> > Choose some Ada books and some Java ones.
> > Have them read by someone who is neither Ada or Java
> > fanatics. Ask him what he thinks, and not what you would like
> > to hear. The conclusion is straightforward.
>
> Well I do that all the time (remember I teach at NYU), so I
> am quite familiar with people's reactions to this task. of
> course it depends on the books, and part of the trouble with
> Java books is that they are weighed down by a ton of very
> disorganized libraries, so I am not sure that the observation
> (which is that people find the Ada books easier) is a fair one.

I think you are wrong here. It is not about how good Ada or Ada book
are. It is about whom you address it. I personally find Ada 95 Raionale
excellent. It was a delight to read it. Yet it will never be a
bestseller. Java and C++ books are awful, yet (therefore) they do their
work. For they do not teach, but PROMOTE. To make a language popular,
one need advertising. It must be as insolent as "Ada is an extension of
C++ especially designed for Windows", then it works.

> No one says that everyone should use Ada for everything.

But everybody is saying that C++ is for anything. There is no place for
correctness in market wars.

--
Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[tmoran]

> > And as usual, exceptions confirm the rule :-)

>In English, most people also think, quite
>wrongly, that this is what the saying means,

  i.e. when most people use the saying, they do indeed mean confirm,
and not test.

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <93f9tu$p2r$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> I suggest you send questions to big software companies about
> Jovial to amuse them :-)

Chuckle chuckle, I guess you did NOT bother to look up Jovial.
As I say, it is surprising for people using Ada to have so
little awareness of the history of the development of the
language.

> The world is greater than you think, I even know software
> companies not  aware of ACT existence, and you must have
> missed some things more
> important than Jovial and currently going on ... :-))

I think you will find that there are few programming languages
that are or have every been in serious use with which I am not
familiar (this is after all my field of research :-)

> Guess what ? few people are still using Intel 286 and a lot
> of software companies don't support it any more !!!

286's are most certainly used in a number of embedded
applications. It is also important to remember that Rad
hardened parts often come out LONG after the normal consumer
chips, so space apps are often using what seem to be quite
old processors. Also, old processors almost never die (just
as old languages tend not to die off completely), a lot of
work is still being done on the 1750, and Vaxes are I think
still being manufactured (or perhaps they just stopped this
month?)

P.S. Poor old Jules, it seems sad that there would be people
who consider themselves Ada knowledgable who have not heard
of JOVIAL :-)


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <93fd9v$s03$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <93f73f$mt1$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> >Do a little research here to find out just how amusing this
ignorance
> is!
>
> Well I followed your advice and found some reasons for my
ignorance,
> and guess we are far more than I thought in that case :-))
>
> For those people here is what I found
>
> - Jovial seems quite unknown outside embedded programing
> folks

That's right, definitely it was pretty much only used for
mission critical embedded projects (remember that this was the
primary original target for Ada, which is why JOVIAL is
relevant to the Ada world).

> - Quite a lot programmers (a mojority ?) including me weren't
> born at Jovial greatest time :-)

True, but very likely they were not around when the x86 was
invented either, and actually Jovial was still in active use
as recently as ten years ago (I think JUG was still meeting
that late -- surely someone here will fill in the date --
certainly I talked at a couple of JUG meetings). The fact
that something was important in the past should not act as
an absolutely barrier to you knowing something about it :-)

> - If you check http://www.xinotech.com/xino-jovial.html
> you'll find some reasons not to loose too much time about
> Jovial future and
> characteristics including :

Well no one actually claimed JOVIAL had a future, I used it
as an arbitrary example of a language that was at this stage
less succesful and less used than Ada. I chose this particular
example (among hundreds that I might have chosen) because I
assumed it would be familiar to Ada knowledgable folks :-)


Your quotes on emulation are a bit bizarre, because that
represents just one possibility. There are of course JOVIAL
applications running today, and being maintained today
on native hardware without emulation. Big legacy projects
can be around for a long long time. I don't know if any
company is providing maintenance on JOVIAL compilers today,
but it would not surprise me to find out that they were
(Averstar would be the most likely candidate if anyone
still is doing JOVIAL support).

Most certainly no one suggests running JOVIAL on PC's for
doing GUI fiddling :-)


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <93fnao$49u$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  dmitry6243@my-deja.com wrote:
> It must be as insolent as "Ada is an extension of
> C++ especially designed for Windows", then it works.

Well I don't think we will be hiring you for Ada awareness
advertising, despite your charming certainty that you know
the true way to make Ada popular :-)

> But everybody is saying that C++ is for anything. There is no
> place for correctness in market wars.

Promoting languages is not easy. You should study the IBM
experience with PL/1, and also the failure of Java on Windows
as examples. The former is ancient history, the latter is
ancient history.

There is no magic to explain why a language is successful, it
really depends on being in the right place at the right time
with an implementation that presents the right environment for
the tasks at hand. After all remember that Visual Basic is
vastly more successful than C or C++ on the PC!



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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Florian Weimer]

Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> writes:

> After all an exception generally DISPROVES a rule, that is
> what scientific progress is all about. One violation of a
> theory in experiment is enough to reject the theory, or at
> least require its refinement.

Few people are familiar with the logic of scientific discovery 
(I've to admit that I didn't read my copy either).  In German, 
we have a proverbial phase in the opposite direction as well 
(something along 'exceptions support the rule'), but no one 
I know uses it in a technical sense or in empirical sciences.

Of course, the whole idea of progress by conjectures and refutations
is not unanimously accepted in non-empirical scienses, I think.  Most
theories are considered good enough as long as they are sound and the
exceptions are so queer that nobody is inclined to bother about them.

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Britt Snodgrass]

Robert Dewar wrote:

<snip> 

> and actually Jovial was still in active use
> as recently as ten years ago (I think JUG was still meeting
> that late -- surely someone here will fill in the date --
> certainly I talked at a couple of JUG meetings). 

Rockwell Collins is still maintaining JOVIAL software in military GPS
receivers today.  JOVIAL was required by the original (early 1980's)
development contract with the Air Force.  Some of the legacy software
has been converted to Ada 83 while most new code is now written in Ada
83 and, to a lesser extent, C. Rockwell has contracted with A.C.T to
provide a Ada 95 compiler for the AAMP processor used in GPS receivers
and other products (http://www.gnat.com/texts/news/news_rockwell.htm).

<snip>

> can be around for a long long time. I don't know if any
> company is providing maintenance on JOVIAL compilers today,
> but it would not surprise me to find out that they were
> (Averstar would be the most likely candidate if anyone
> still is doing JOVIAL support).
> 

Software Engineering Associates still supports JOVIAL. See
http://www.seadeo.com/ 

Britt Snodgrass

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Florian Weimer]

Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> writes:

> and Vaxes are I think still being manufactured (or perhaps they just
> stopped this month?)

Production stopped a longer time ago, but your last chance to order a
VAX passed last fall, I think.

> P.S. Poor old Jules, it seems sad that there would be people
> who consider themselves Ada knowledgable who have not heard
> of JOVIAL :-)

What was so special about this language that the DoD wanted to get rid
of it, BTW?

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Florian Weimer]

Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> writes:

> You should study the IBM experience with PL/1, [...]

Do you have a reference to the literature?

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Warren W. Gay VE3WWG]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> In article <93fnao$49u$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   dmitry6243@my-deja.com wrote:
> > It must be as insolent as "Ada is an extension of
> > C++ especially designed for Windows", then it works.
> 
> Well I don't think we will be hiring you for Ada awareness
> advertising, despite your charming certainty that you know
> the true way to make Ada popular :-)
> 
> > But everybody is saying that C++ is for anything. There is no
> > place for correctness in market wars.
> 
> Promoting languages is not easy. You should study the IBM
> experience with PL/1, and also the failure of Java on Windows
> as examples. The former is ancient history, the latter is
> ancient history.
> 
> There is no magic to explain why a language is successful, it
> really depends on being in the right place at the right time
> with an implementation that presents the right environment for
> the tasks at hand. After all remember that Visual Basic is
> vastly more successful than C or C++ on the PC!

I believe that one thing that held back Ada for the masses, was
the size of the compiler, and its availability. All of that has
changed now.

Today, gnat no longer consumes your system when it compiles and
it is freely available now. This could actually turn the tables 
for Open Source developers (at least) if you can only convince 
developers to give it an honest try.

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://members.home.net/ve3wwg

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Simon Wright]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1367 bytes --]

Karel Thoenissen <thoenissen@hello.nl> writes:

> Exactly the same thing in Dutch: 'uitzonderingen bevestigen de regel'
> (exceptions _confirm_ the rule). To my knowledge and that of my dictionary this
> is not taken from English. I took a look in my dictionary of proverbs, with
> proverbal translations and explanations in each of these langauges:
> 
> Dutch     Uitzonderingen bevestigen de regel      => Geen regel zonder
> uitzondeing
> German  Ausnahmen best�tigen die Regel          => Keine Regel ohne Ausnahme
> French    L' exception confirme la r�gle              => Pas de r�gle sans
> exception
> English    Exceptions prove the rule                    => There is no rule
> without some exception

Actually I think very few native English-speakers have other than the
vaguest of ideas on the meaning of this one. I suspect the meaning
of a proverb is what people think it is, not what a textbook says ..

I rather think I'm one of the confused.

Something like "if a rule appears to have exceptions, you need to
demonstrate that they aren't really exceptions or modify the rule."

Clearly _not_ what your dictionary says ..

-- 
Simon Wright                       Work Email: simon.j.wright@amsjv.com
Alenia Marconi Systems                        Voice: +44(0)23-9270-1778
Integrated Systems Division                     FAX: +44(0)23-9270-1800

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[tmoran]

>P.S. Poor old Jules, it seems sad that there would be people
>who consider themselves Ada knowledgable who have not heard
>of JOVIAL :-)
  Or it's excellent that people young enough to have never
heard of JOVIAL are using Ada. :)

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Keith Thompson]

Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> writes:
> In article <93bv37$43b$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
[...]
> > And as usual, exceptions confirm the rule :-)
> > The percentage of companies non using Ada is high enough just
> > to make obvious the generalization.
> 
> Your generalization was about Ada programs as I read it, so I
> do not understand that (by the way, you have garbled the idiom
> here, it is "exceptions prove the rule", and the word prove
> here means "test" not "proof" as in mathematics. In other
> words, this idiom means that you test rules by looking for
> counterexamples -- well I will have to file this along with
> other entertaining "round-trip idioms" -- my favorite was
> someone from France announcing that a particular task was
> easy --- "a slice of pie" -- from that day on in Alsys, all
> sorts of simple tasks were referred to as a "slice of pie" :-)

Actually, that's not what the idiom means, or at least not what it
originally meant.  The origin of "The exception proves the rule" is an
old legal principle, "Exceptio figit regulam in non exceptis".  An
(explicitly stated) exception proves the *existence* of the rule, not
its general truth.

See <http://www.alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxtheexc.html> for more
details.  Here's an excerpt:

    As MEU says, "the original legal sense" of the "the exception
    proves the rule" is as follows: "'Special leave is given for men
    to be out of barracks tonight till 11.0 p.m.'; 'The exception
    proves the rule' means that this special leave implies a rule
    requiring men, except when an exception is made, to be in earlier.
    The value of this in interpreting statutes is plain."

-- 
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) kst@cts.com  <http://www.ghoti.net/~kst>
San Diego Supercomputer Center           <*>  <http://www.sdsc.edu/~kst>
MAKE MONEY FAST!!  DON'T FEED IT!!

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[mark_lundquist]

In article <3A5A5B32.A6358672@uol.com.br>,
  Cesar Scarpini Rabak <csrabak@uol.com.br> wrote:
>
> Worse! Research firms like Gartner Group and its peers classify Ada
as a
> "mature" language "not recommended" for new projects. . . the next
stage
> is "obsolecent" when they recommend the substitution of the program or
> rewrite in another language. It should come in 3 to 5 years!
>
> Cesar
>

I guess only immature languages are suitable for new projects :-/

-- mark


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[dmitry6243]

In article <93fq4o$6j7$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <93fnao$49u$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   dmitry6243@my-deja.com wrote:
> > It must be as insolent as "Ada is an extension of
> > C++ especially designed for Windows", then it works.
>
> Well I don't think we will be hiring you for Ada awareness
> advertising, despite your charming certainty that you know
> the true way to make Ada popular :-)

If I knew how to do it! (:-)) Unfortunately all my attempts to convince
our customers no, not to use, just to consider Ada as an opportunity
have failed. To my limited view, the major reason why, is that 90% of
people never heard this word and the rest think that it another name of
Nabokov's Lolita (:-)).

> > But everybody is saying that C++ is for anything. There is no
> > place for correctness in market wars.
>
> Promoting languages is not easy. You should study the IBM
> experience with PL/1, and also the failure of Java on Windows
> as examples. The former is ancient history, the latter is
> ancient history.

Do you consider PL/1 as a commercial failure? I remember the time when
it was the language of the first choice. That time FORTRAN-IV played the
role of Visual Basic now (everybody know it is bad and still use it) and
PL/1 was something like C++ (everybody thinks it is good and wants to
use it). That time it was surely a (commercial) success.

> There is no magic to explain why a language is successful, it
> really depends on being in the right place at the right time
> with an implementation that presents the right environment for
> the tasks at hand.

There is usually no magic to explain something. The magic is to make
something that would require explanations. (:-))

From this thread:

> > Anybody who talked about Ada to software people not using Ada (which
> > are unfortunately everything but a minority) knows that the usual
> > answer is : "Ada ? this still exists ???"
>
> This has not been my experience.  The response I usually hear is:
>
>  What's Ada?

To my experince, nobody even questions what is Ada.

--
Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Florian Weimer]

Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam (Larry Kilgallen) writes:

>>> Worse! Research firms like Gartner Group and its peers classify Ada as a
>>> "mature" language "not recommended" for new projects. . .

> > And how are the languages called which are recommended for new
> > projects?  "Evolving"?
> 
> The proper terminology is:
> 
> 	Immature

That's a bit too negative, isn't it?  "Evolving" sounds much nicer and
full of possibilites (although it isn't fun to perpetually rewrite
large parts of your code to follow language and compiler development.)

BTW: Your newsreader is broken.  It truncates the References: header
was cut off after 511 characters.

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[David Kristola]

On Tue, 9 Jan 2001 11:48:03 -0800, Robert Dewar wrote
(in message <93fpth$697$1@nnrp1.deja.com>):

> True, but very likely they were not around when the x86 was invented either, 
> and actually Jovial was still in active use as recently as ten years ago (I 
> think JUG was still meeting that late -- surely someone here will fill in 
> the date -- certainly I talked at a couple of JUG meetings). The fact that 
> something was important in the past should not act as an absolutely barrier 
> to you knowing something about it :-)

There are fully functioning satellites in orbit around the Earth right 
now with flight software written in JOVIAL.  They should be operational 
for many years to come.  And while they are, their flight software will 
be maintained here on the ground by JOVIAL (and hopefully jovial) 
software engineers.


-- 
--djk, keeper of arcane lore & trivial fluff
Home: David95036 plus 1 at america on-line
Spam: goto.hades@welovespam.com

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[n_brunot]

In article <93fpth$697$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> True, but very likely they were not around when the x86 was
> invented either, and actually Jovial was still in active use
> as recently as ten years ago

as recently as ten years ago ... :-)
That explains a lot ...
Embedded programming is truly very important (I hope nobody felt
offended by what was said about Jovial) but it's far from being
everything in software world.
For all the rest, I suggest you seriously consider updating your time
scale notions of what's going on in modern softwares :-)
I thought first Gnat versions much younger but anyway highly obsolete :-
)



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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Marin David Condic]

It wasn't all that bad. It had a more C-ish flavor to it with a dash of
Fortran thrown in for seasoning. It was not as cryptic as C - mostly. The
real reason for ditching it (beside it being rather dated and better
concepts had come along) was the whole reason for Ada. The DoD was
supporting dozens - or hundreds - of different, obscure programming
languages all over the place. It would save money to not do that.

MDC

Florian Weimer wrote:

> What was so special about this language that the DoD wanted to get rid
> of it, BTW?

--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey
    and car keys to teenage boys."

        --   P. J. O'Rourke
======================================================================

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Marin David Condic]

Well, maybe someone will come up with a Jovial front-end to gcc and it will
get a new lease on life? Stranger things have happened - but offhand I can't
think of one. :-)

MDC

n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:

> as recently as ten years ago ... :-)
> That explains a lot ...
> Embedded programming is truly very important (I hope nobody felt
> offended by what was said about Jovial) but it's far from being
> everything in software world.
> For all the rest, I suggest you seriously consider updating your time
> scale notions of what's going on in modern softwares :-)
> I thought first Gnat versions much younger but anyway highly obsolete :-
> )

--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey
    and car keys to teenage boys."

        --   P. J. O'Rourke
======================================================================

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Pascal Obry]

dmitry6243@my-deja.com writes:

> If I knew how to do it! (:-)) Unfortunately all my attempts to convince
> our customers no, not to use, just to consider Ada as an opportunity
> have failed. To my limited view, the major reason why, is that 90% of
> people never heard this word and the rest think that it another name of
> Nabokov's Lolita (:-)).

I feel your pain. I had the same problem but I have found the solution.
In my case (I pretty well understand that this is not the case for 
everybody - [1]) our customers want a tool (not the code). Before, I was asking
if Ada was a possible choice and you know the answer, now I just don't ask
(the language is not part of the deal - as I said they want a tool with such
and such features) and I just do it in Ada. That's it "Just do It" !

Why did I do that ? Because most of the time nobody ask if the project can be
done in C or C++ or Java, rights ? The contract is (again, in my case):

   - the tool must have such and such features
   - the tool must have such and such response time
   - the tool must be around for at least this amount of time
   - the maintenance is part of the deal (no code is delivered)

This is not the case for many projects, but at least it is working fine this
way as clients and developers are quite happy :)

Pascal.

[1] I'm talking about projects in Information System and nothing mission
    critical or real time... Contraints in this world are far from
    restrictive, this is the play ground for hackers in the Web technologies
    and software that does fail (as part of the contract :) So that's not so
    hard to do better :)

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|         http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pascal.obry
--|
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Ken Garlington]

"David Kristola" <David95037@See-My.Sig> wrote in message
news:01HW.B6817C6D0007BC9B078EC71C@news.pacbell.net...
: On Tue, 9 Jan 2001 11:48:03 -0800, Robert Dewar wrote
: (in message <93fpth$697$1@nnrp1.deja.com>):
:
: > True, but very likely they were not around when the x86 was invented
either,
: > and actually Jovial was still in active use as recently as ten years ago
(I
: > think JUG was still meeting that late -- surely someone here will fill
in
: > the date -- certainly I talked at a couple of JUG meetings). The fact
that
: > something was important in the past should not act as an absolutely
barrier
: > to you knowing something about it :-)
:
: There are fully functioning satellites in orbit around the Earth right
: now with flight software written in JOVIAL.  They should be operational
: for many years to come.  And while they are, their flight software will
: be maintained here on the ground by JOVIAL (and hopefully jovial)
: software engineers.

There is also JOVIAL software in the F-16 and contemporary weapon systems,
and it is still being maintained. However, every year, there is pressure to
convert more and more of it to another language. Tools to support conversion
of JOVIAL to other languages appear to be selling fairly well. I would be
very skeptical if there's a single new project being written in JOVIAL, and
I would guess all the existing systems will be gone within 20 years -- a
relatively short lifetime compared to some MIS applications.

I also suspect that the Y2K scare may have also put a significant dent in
the existence of languages like RPG and JCL, but I could be wrong.

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Ken Garlington]

"Marin David Condic" <mcondic.nospam@acm.org> wrote in message
news:3A5C53F3.5171CE3F@acm.org...
: It wasn't all that bad. It had a more C-ish flavor to it with a dash of
: Fortran thrown in for seasoning. It was not as cryptic as C - mostly.

I think that's a little harsh. Actually, it had some support (admittedly
weak) for areas where Ada usually is considered to hold an advantage. For
example:

-- An analogue to record representation specifications
-- Support for fixed-point arithmetic
-- The COMPOOL mechanism, which encouraged modularity.

Granted, it's been a while since I programmed in JOVIAL, but my recollection
is that it was better than C or FORTRAN for use in embedded systems.

: The
: real reason for ditching it (beside it being rather dated and better
: concepts had come along) was the whole reason for Ada. The DoD was
: supporting dozens - or hundreds - of different, obscure programming
: languages all over the place. It would save money to not do that.
:
: MDC
:
: Florian Weimer wrote:
:
: > What was so special about this language that the DoD wanted to get rid
: > of it, BTW?
:
: --
: ======================================================================
: Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
: Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
: Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/
:
:     "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey
:     and car keys to teenage boys."
:
:         --   P. J. O'Rourke
: ======================================================================
:
:

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Jerry Petrey]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> In article <93f9tu$p2r$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> > I suggest you send questions to big software companies about
> > Jovial to amuse them :-)
> 
> Chuckle chuckle, I guess you did NOT bother to look up Jovial.
> As I say, it is surprising for people using Ada to have so
> little awareness of the history of the development of the
> language.
> 
> > The world is greater than you think, I even know software
> > companies not  aware of ACT existence, and you must have
> > missed some things more
> > important than Jovial and currently going on ... :-))
> 
> I think you will find that there are few programming languages
> that are or have every been in serious use with which I am not
> familiar (this is after all my field of research :-)
> 
> > Guess what ? few people are still using Intel 286 and a lot
> > of software companies don't support it any more !!!
> 
> 286's are most certainly used in a number of embedded
> applications. It is also important to remember that Rad
> hardened parts often come out LONG after the normal consumer
> chips, so space apps are often using what seem to be quite
> old processors. Also, old processors almost never die (just
> as old languages tend not to die off completely), a lot of
> work is still being done on the 1750, and Vaxes are I think
> still being manufactured (or perhaps they just stopped this
> month?)
> 
> P.S. Poor old Jules, it seems sad that there would be people
> who consider themselves Ada knowledgable who have not heard
> of JOVIAL :-)
> 
> Sent via Deja.com
> http://www.deja.com/


Robert, it is also sad to me that so many "programmers" and "software
engineers"
today don't treat our science like other sciences.  Can you imagine a
physicist
who wouldn't study the works of Newton, Bohr, or Rutherford because they
were
"born before his time".  In software today it seems like people just
want to 
get into it fast, learn the latest 'in' language and start making
money.  Perhaps
that is why there is so much bad software out there.

Jerry
-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Jerry Petrey                                                
-- Senior Principal Systems Engineer - Navigation, Guidance, & Control
-- Raytheon Missile Systems          - Member Team Ada & Team
Forth                
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Georg Bauhaus]

Jerry Petrey (jdpetrey@west.raytheon.com) wrote:

:   In software today it seems like people just
: want to 
: get into it fast, learn the latest 'in' language and start making
: money.  Perhaps
: that is why there is so much bad software out there.

Yes, and what is the solution?
If those who hire people for writing programs were a bit
more knowledgeable wrt programming, or at least knew someone
who is, at least the small and very small software projects
might look different.

I.e. management must learn what programming is or consult
someone about it. That starts at the university level, there
not in the unpopular math oriented courses, but those on
economy givven by teachers they like. Don't
all the teachers here know this?
  In an area that Ada programmers might not
want to call real programming, i.e. in the overabundance of
"set up an interactive website" area, projects seem to be slowly
drifting from script fiddling to more carefully planned
applications, at least this is what I hear and see every now
and then.
Surprise after surprise about the time and memory constraints of
some interpreted languages and those of transaction based
DBMSs... 

there is a certain level of detail to be mastered when
you want to use a language like Ada, chapters 1 and 2 in
Norman Cohens book illustrate this. The people whom Jerry
characterized won't stand this without further sweets
(hipness, prestige, fun reading, fun listening, money, ...)
when they just want to get the job done (an idiom stressed
in this nwes group). So where are the sweets for the
not-so-mathematically oriented?

Much as you won't stand the devisability intro to number
theory and analysing gcd when you just want some
calculatoion to be fast _unless_ you have reason to
be interested.  Fill in reasons for having reason :-)

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <87zoh0lall.fsf@deneb.enyo.de>,
  Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote:

> What was so special about this language that the DoD wanted
> to get rid of it, BTW?

That's a wrong impression, they did not specially want to get
rid of JOVIAL, and indeed JOVIAL for a long time had an ardent
band of supporters, but so did many of the other hundreds of
languages they were using, and the idea behind the HOLWG which
lead to Ada was to replace this babel with a single unifying
language. People complain that it is hard to find Ada engineers
to day, but this was nothing compared to finding engineers
familiar with some bizarre variant of JOVIAL or one of the
other peculiar languages used only on one or two projects.


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

By the way, regarding current activity in the JOVIAL area,
DDCI announces JOVIAL support on their main web page.


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <93hi4f$hcu$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> For all the rest, I suggest you seriously consider updating
> your time scale notions of what's going on in modern
> softwares :-)

Perhaps there is a language problem here, go back and reread
the posts. The point of introducing JOVIAL had nothing to do
with "modern softare", quite the contrary: I was giving an
example of a language that had pretty much died out but which
was once used reasonably widely.

> I thought first Gnat versions much younger but anyway highly
> obsolete :-

Sorry, that's too far from being a parsable english sentence
to be comprehensible, perhaps you could write it in French and
we would have a better shot at understanding what you are
trying to say.


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <01HW.B6817C6D0007BC9B078EC71C@news.pacbell.net>,
  David Kristola <David95037@See-My.Sig> wrote:
> There are fully functioning satellites in orbit around the
> Earth right  now with flight software written in JOVIAL.
> They should be operational  for many years to come.  And
> while they are, their flight software will  be maintained
> here on the ground by JOVIAL (and hopefully jovial)
> software engineers.


Just to be clear, I was not saying that I thought JOVIAL had
disappeared completely. I am quite aware of a number of active
projects using the language (the fact that N. Brunot has not
heard of a language does not mean it does not exist :-)

I chose it as an example of a language less used than Ada,
and I don't think even the most ardent jovial JOVIAL programmer
would disagree.

And by the way, it is quite an interesting language, and for
the time it was invented, quite innovative. There was a reason
that it became quite widely used :-)


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <87itnn7lfi.fsf@deneb.enyo.de>,
  Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote:
> Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam (Larry Kilgallen) writes:
>
> >>> Worse! Research firms like Gartner Group and its peers
classify Ada as a
> >>> "mature" language "not recommended" for new projects. . .
>
> > > And how are the languages called which are recommended
for new
> > > projects?  "Evolving"?
> >
> > The proper terminology is:
> >
> > 	Immature
>
> That's a bit too negative, isn't it?  "Evolving" sounds much
> nicer and full of possibilites


No, that's not supportable. Mature and immature are one
dimension, evolving and static are another. All four
possibilities are there. If something is not mature, it is
immature. Sometimes maturity may come with a lack of
flexibility to evolve, but that is not necessarily the
case at all.


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Re: What to Do?

[km0762]

In article <3A4F5A4A.9ABA2C4F@chicagonet.net>,
  Petra Lynn Hofman <petrahof@chicagonet.net>
wrote:
> After reading several threads discussing C++,
C#, Java and Ada I'm in a
> quandry over what system to concentrate on.
I'm learning C++ at the
> moment but wonder if that is the best choice.
After looking a Ada and
> available jobs it would appear that there is
limited opportunities for
> someone >40 and outside of military/defense
industries.  Comments and
> opinions are greatly appreciated.  Petra.
>
I find it strange that you are considering C++/C#
vs. Ada.  Ada is completely irrelevant wrt the
job market, while C++ is still the major player.
If the reason is, that you feel more comfortable
with Ada syntax as compared to C++ and you
would rather work with Ada, I would suggest that
you
consider Oracle-rpogramming in PL/SQL,
which is quite similar in syntax to Ada.
And there is a much larger demand for PL/SQL
programmers as there is for Ada programmers.

regards,

-Klaus.


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Re: What to Do?

[km0762]

In article <3A4F5A4A.9ABA2C4F@chicagonet.net>,
  Petra Lynn Hofman <petrahof@chicagonet.net>
wrote:
> After reading several threads discussing C++,
C#, Java and Ada I'm in a
> quandry over what system to concentrate on.
I'm learning C++ at the
> moment but wonder if that is the best choice.
After looking a Ada and
> available jobs it would appear that there is
limited opportunities for
> someone >40 and outside of military/defense
industries.  Comments and
> opinions are greatly appreciated.  Petra.
>
I find it strange that you are considering C++/C#
vs. Ada.  Ada is completely irrelevant wrt the
job market, while C++ is still the major player.
If the reason is, that you feel more comfortable
with Ada syntax as compared to C++ and you
would rather work with Ada, I would suggest that
you
consider Oracle-rpogramming in PL/SQL,
which is quite similar in syntax to Ada.
And there is a much larger demand for PL/SQL
programmers as there is for Ada programmers.

regards,

-Klaus.


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Re: What to Do?

[James Rogers]

Klaus,

I find it strange that anyone is currently considering C#, when there
are NO jobs for that language. I suppose you could tie your future to
your belief in the future marketing success of Microsoft.

I cannot see how C# might be more relevant in the job market
than Ada, which clearly does have job demand. 

Has C# surpassed Ada in the job market simply because your expect
it to? Is this how you make technical and job decisions? You follow
Microsoft marketing announcements? Why be interested in C# in
favor of Visual Basic?

Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado

km0762@my-deja.com wrote:
> I find it strange that you are considering C++/C#
> vs. Ada.  Ada is completely irrelevant wrt the
> job market, while C++ is still the major player.
> If the reason is, that you feel more comfortable
> with Ada syntax as compared to C++ and you
> would rather work with Ada, I would suggest that
> you
> consider Oracle-rpogramming in PL/SQL,
> which is quite similar in syntax to Ada.
> And there is a much larger demand for PL/SQL
> programmers as there is for Ada programmers.
>

Re: What to Do?

[Al Christians]

James Rogers wrote:
> 
> I find it strange that anyone is currently considering C#, when there
> are NO jobs for that language. 

I tried to check your claim by searching for C# jobs.  

Dice.com gave me 865 entries in my area alone -- but that included all 
the C and C++ job listings, and IDK if there were any C# jobs 
in there at all.  Looks like a good opportunity for an Ada programmer
to write a new search routine for Dice.Com. 

Monster.Com gave me no jobs.  It said that it was expecting a closing
parenthesis.  I hope it wasn't expecting one from me, since I only
sent it C#, not any opening parenthesis. But just for fun, I asked 
Monster.Com for C#) jobs, (C#) jobs, and C#)))))))))) jobs.  It said it 
was still expecting a closing parenthesis. Looks like a good
opportunity  for an Ada programmer to write a new search routine for
Monster.Com. 

HotJobs.Com gave me over 1000 jobs in my area.  Looks like every
job posting that includes the letter C.  Looks like a good opportunity 
for an Ada programmer to write a new search routine for Monster.Com. 

Next I tried www.Search.ComputerJobs.Com.  It told me that 'It appears
that your search string "c#" contains one or more ignored words.'
Looks like a good opportunity for an Ada programmer to write a new
search routine for www.Search.Computerjobs.Com.  

Last chance:  Headhunter.Net.  It says 'Keyword phrase C#.  There seems
to be a problem with your keywords.'  Looks like a good opportunity for
an Ada programmer to write a new search routine for  Headhunter.Net.  

Bottom line:  There may or may not be any jobs.  If there are any jobs,
nobody knows about them because they are impossible to find, and 
prospective employers may be having some trouble attracting talent 
through the usual channels.


Al

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Frank Manning]

In article <3A5C8FC4.2EED0D77@west.raytheon.com>,
  Jerry Petrey <jdpetrey@west.raytheon.com> wrote:
>
> Robert, it is also sad to me that so many "programmers" and "software
> engineers" today don't treat our science like other sciences. Can
> you imagine a physicist who wouldn't study the works of Newton,
> Bohr, or Rutherford because they were "born before his time". In
> software today it seems like people just want to get into it fast,
> learn the latest 'in' language and start making money. Perhaps that
> is why there is so much bad software out there.

Reminds me of the old saying about the difference between scientists
and programmers -- scientists stand on the sholders of those who went
before. Programmers stand on the feet of those who went before.

-- Frank Manning   :-)


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[dmitry6243]

In article <u3derttjr.fsf@wanadoo.fr>,
  Pascal Obry <p.obry@wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> In my case (I pretty well understand that this is not the case for
> everybody - [1]) our customers want a tool (not the code). Before, I
> was asking if Ada was a possible choice and you know the answer, now I
> just don't ask (the language is not part of the deal - as I said they
> want a tool with such and such features) and I just do it in Ada.
> That's it "Just do It" !

I am using this trick too. Unfortunately it works only if you deliver a
complete system (tool) and the customer is so uneducated that he does
not know how to turn the computer on.

[ It is a real story! (:-)). A customer wanted a quality control
system. A bit image processing, a bit pattern recognition. I managed to
bring Ada into that project. After the system was tested and installed,
we received a "bug report" from the customer. We sent our engineer there
and he discovered that the customer didn't turn on the computer!
Thank to Ada, it was the LAST bug report. ]

--
Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[n_brunot]

In article <93ikl3$i6v$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:

> Perhaps there is a language problem here, go back and reread
> the posts.
<snip>
> Sorry, that's too far from being a parsable english sentence
> to be comprehensible, perhaps you could write it in French and
> we would have a better shot at understanding what you are
> trying to say.

You extremely often see language problems everywhere :-)
Most of the english spoken in the world is even worse than that and
everybody understands :-)
I could make an long list of native english people who actually wonder
if you read things before answering, and see nothing in common between
short and clear questions and your more than lengthy and unrelated
answers ... :-)

May be communication problems between you and a great part of the rest
of the world is a more appropriate explanation than language problems :-
)



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Re: JOVIAL (was Do we need "Mission-Critical" software?)

[Ken Garlington]

"Robert Dewar" <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:93ihgp$fah$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
: By the way, regarding current activity in the JOVIAL area,
: DDCI announces JOVIAL support on their main web page.

I'm not sure what "announce" means here... according to the description of
their JOVIAL product line, their compiler was built in 1983! IIRC, DDC-I
(http://www.ddci.com) bought this toolset from InterACT (which was
previously known as ACT, oddly enough) some time back. The InterACT compiler
was the standard for the F-16 software developed at Fort Worth, and there is
still some software which is maintained using it (less every day, as I noted
previously). I don't remember exactly what happened to InterACT, but I
couldn't locate them with a web search.

As far as I know there are also two other compilers available: the ITS
toolset managed by the Air Force (http://www.wpafb.af.mil/jovial/) and the
PSS compiler (http://www.pro-software.com/). These were the same three
compilers around in 1984 when I was programming in JOVIAL, so there's
certainly not been much growth in this field. Based on these websites, I get
the sense that there haven't been many sales lately either.

In their December 2000 newsletter, DDC-I does talk about the use of
SCORE/ANDF technology to help mitigate language obsolescence issues, and
says: "The original code may have been written in languages not used or
taught today, e.g. JOVIAL. Hiring programmers with these skills or even
training current staff may not be possible. Instead of continuing the old
language, the new software is written in a more modern language." DDC-I is
also actively promoting their support for moving from VAXen to Solaris, so
I'd say their opinion of the future of either JOVIAL or VAX is not positive!

Re: What to Do?

[John English]

James Rogers wrote:
> I find it strange that anyone is currently considering C#, when there
> are NO jobs for that language. I suppose you could tie your future to
> your belief in the future marketing success of Microsoft.

Oh, I dunno... there are probably companies out there saying to
themselves "what we really need is a bunch of programmers with at
least 5 years experience of using C#"... ;-)

-----------------------------------------------------------------
 John English              | mailto:je@brighton.ac.uk
 Senior Lecturer           | http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/staff/je
 Dept. of Computing        | ** NON-PROFIT CD FOR CS STUDENTS **
 University of Brighton    |    -- see http://burks.bton.ac.uk
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Re: What to Do?

[William Dale]

John English wrote:
> 
> James Rogers wrote:
> > I find it strange that anyone is currently considering C#, when there
> > are NO jobs for that language. I suppose you could tie your future to
> > your belief in the future marketing success of Microsoft.
> 
> Oh, I dunno... there are probably companies out there saying to
> themselves "what we really need is a bunch of programmers with at
> least 5 years experience of using C#"... ;-)

So hire Ada programmers ;-)  


William Dale
Ada has made you lazy and careless.
You can write programs in C that are just as safe
by the simple application of super-human diligence.
LM,SSO
mailto:william.dale.jr@lmco.com
mailto:n2rhv@arrl.net

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[mark_lundquist]

In article <93c0e9$4u6$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <937kc7$ssq$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
>
> > Through the history of Ada we have had people saying
> > "If only we did X, then Ada would be more widely used"
> >
> > But most of these claims have proved experimentally false, and
> > I think this is another such case. If someone produced a much
> > improved c2ada, I doubt this would suddenly make Ada popular.
>
> I agree.
> Experimentally, one must aknowledge that today Ada is far less popular
> than other languages, even than much younger ones.
> This will not suddenly and magically change without real questions and
> answers about that.

It probably won't "suddenly and magically" change in any case :-) :-)

I would contend that the reasons why Ada has not caught on yet are
fairly well understood.

Here's one answer for your consideration: "To those making decisions
about implementation languages (on whatever scale -- individual, team,
corporate...), the perceived costs of using Ada outweigh the percieved
value."

And I think what we have now is a kind of perception "inversion", where
the value as perceived is deflated (because people don't understand or
appreciate the benefits), and the perceived costs are inflated.

For Ada to grow, its percieved value needs to rise and/or its perceived
costs need to fall.  For both of these aspects, effort needs to be
directed at both actuality and perceptions.  For instance, more real
value can be added to the overall Ada value proposition through the
creation of more and better tools, libraries, and components; meanwhile
more efforts need to be made to help people to appreciate the value of
Ada -- this is where, as you point out, there is a need for people who
know how to get out of "preaching to the choir" mode and communicate in
a way that understands the target audience.

Similarly, with the cost aspect -- whatever can be done to reduce
actual costs will help, and we also need to help get the perception of
relative cost down where it belongs.

Also, there's no one-size-fits all approach to promoting Ada.  An
effective approach to addressing programmers I think would be totally
different from an effect approach to adddressing decision makers at the
level where financial considerations are the primary concern.

Before anyone points out that my "perceived cost and value" answer is
vacuous and question-begging, let me be the first! :-)  Underlying that
answser is a complex of issues (most of which I think are still not
terribly hard to understand) that all contribute to a critical-mass
effect (a.k.a. "self-fulfilling prophecy").  For a good discussion of
critical-mass economic phenomena, read Thomas C. Schelling's
book, "Micromotives and Macrobehaviors" -- Chapter 3, "Thermostats,
Lemons, and Other Families of Models".


> Most explanations we read can unfortunately be summarized by :
>
> "Ada is the best, the rest of the world should start to understand it"
> followed by a bunch of technical justifications
>
> This is the main thing that really experimentally proved to be totally
> counterproductive, even if this is often true.
> Only Ada users really care about those explanations.
> So the result is that Ada users keep convincing one another that they
> made the best choice.
> This is totally useless since they are already convinced.
> The only consequence is that this keep us blind at the fact that we
> haven't the slightest chance to promote Ada with this attitude.

I agree completely...

Mark Lundquist
Rational Software


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[mark_lundquist]

In article <932mi6$r2k$1@trog.dera.gov.uk>,
  "Kevin Rigotti" <rigotti@atc.dera.gov.uk> wrote:
> Much as it pains me to say so, Ada is not always the most appropriate
> language.
>
> For example, however good the bindings, toolsets, etc that are
available it
> is simply easier and more convenient to write X Windows user
interfaces in
> C/C++ because that's what the  designers expected you to do.

Does it follow because "the designers expected" you to code in C for X,
that it is therefore "easier and more convenient" to do so, "however
good the bindings... etc."?  That's not at all obvious to me.  Am I
missing something?

Is your statement based on actual experience with Ada bindings to X?

And even so, "easier and more convenient to write" is not the only
criterion of fitness, would you not agree?  Probably not even the most
important criterion...

> Bindings and support for Gtk are a good thing, but at the end of the
day
> what I and others in a similar situation really want to do is to
build the
> clever stuff in Ada then hand it over for integration with someone
elses
> GUI, produced using whatever is cheapest and easiest.

Your statement here suggests to me that you just are not interested in
GUIs or GUI programming!  You care about "the clever stuff" :-)

You haven't substantiated your claim that programming GUIs in C/C++
is "cheapest and easiest".  You're just saying, "Who cares, it's only
the GUI -- just so long as I get to write my clever stuff in Ada",
right?

Fair enough, but then how about leaving the discussion of Ada GUI
bindings to people who _do_ care about writing them?  To offer
something you don't give a rip about as an example of an area where you
would yield to the idea of Ada being less suitable than other languages
seems a bit disingenuous... :-)

>
> I don't care if the trivial stuff is written in C, C++, Java or
anything
> else

There's a sense in which GUIs might be considered "trivial", but that
sense isn't particularly relevant to the discussion at hand.  GUIs are
neither unimportant to the product, nor are they especially easy to
program.  Here again, I suspect that by the word "trivial" you mean
that they are uninteresting to you personally...

Last year I delivered a project in C.  This was a software licensing
component that wrapped an interface to a commercial license-management
product and added additional semantics (while hiding unnecessary
features of that interface).  This was in many ways a trivial project.
Because of the nature of the project, how and where and by whom the
component was going to be integrated etc., I wasn't able to implement
it in Ada.  But man, did I wish that I could!  It really would have
been quicker, easier, and more convenient, in spite of the fact that
the designers of that commercial licensing product certainly
do "expect" you to code to their C interface.

Note that my real-life example confirms your broader point -- that
sometimes Ada is not the most suitable language -- but falsifies the
notion that this has anything to do with ease and convenience of
coding.  Hence I would expect that I would probably say the class of
cases where Ada is less suitable is probably smaller than you would
probably say it is.

On a side note -- I originally implemented this licensing component in
C++, but the integration issues due to platform differences and
compiler version dependencies in a multiplatform, shared-library
environment made this impossible, as far as I could determine.  So I
had to reimplement it in C, ripping out all the STL and hand-coding the
collection stuff, etc.

> but I do care about integration costs, particularly if they are so
> painful that I have to implement experiment critical code in a
language I
> consider inappropriate in order to reduce them.

Aren't you letting the tail wag the dog?  You're saying that the
ability to integrate "seamlessly" from Ada to C/C++ is crucially
important, otherwise you might be forced to implement your "clever
stuff" in C/C++ just so you can avoid the cost of cross-language
interfacing to integrate with the "trivial" part, which somehow can
only be implemented in C/C++.  If it's so trivial, why would it be so
unreasonable to implement it in Ada, especially if you already have a
binding that hides the cross-language level of integration from you to
begin with?

>
> So, the thing that would make the biggest impact on the uptake of Ada
in my
> environment at the moment is being able to mix and match Ada with C++
> seamlessly, using whichever fitted the problem most cost effectively.
>

I'm betting that cultural and organizational factors have more to do
with your situation than you are letting on, as much or more so than do
technical factors... whaddya say?

> [...]
>
> We could then use the youngest, cheapest staff for the C++ hacking

You seriously have part of your product that is so unimportant that it
can be fully entrusted to young cheap C++ hacking?  I find that hard to
believe...

> and when
> they'd had time to learn what real software engineering was all about
they
> could move on to doing the important stuff in Ada.

C++ hacking leaves no time for learning what real software engineering
is all about :-)  All time is consumed with chasing down link-time
errors and debugging run-time errors.  Meanwhile it conditions
programmers to think that nonsense is normal...

Anyway Kevin, I think your perspective is a little bit sick and
twisted :-) :-) First, the idea that parts of the programming product
are unimportant, and secondly the idea that C(++) is "good enough" for
the unimportant parts, while somehow it's not good enough for your
important parts!

Best regards,
-- mark



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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[mark_lundquist]

In article <93fnao$49u$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  dmitry6243@my-deja.com wrote:

> To make a language popular,
> one need advertising. It must be as insolent as "Ada is an extension
of
> C++ especially designed for Windows", then it works.

Of course this is hyperbole, but I see your point.

I think a good case could be made that Ada is Java++...

Ada runs on the JVM.

Java believes in strong static typing.  That's a step in the right
direction, but they kept the impoverished type system of C++.  Ada has
a type system that's not only strong, but rich as well.  To start with,
you can have subtypes, and you have the ability to create user-defined
primitive types, etc.

Java wanted to get rid of pointer-related bugs.  Unfortunately, you
kind of have to have pointers!  So Java is a by-reference language,
hiding the pointer-ness of everything so that it's impossible to do
math on pointers.  By-reference languages have their own problems,
though.  Ada solves the pointer arithmetic problems by distinguishing
between pointers and addresses, and by defining pointers to be
something other than scalar types.

Java figured out that truth value has nothing to do with integer math,
so it got a Boolean type like Ada's.

Java believes that support for concurrency belongs in the language, not
just some random OS library.  Java is right about that!  They just
didn't think it through all the way and botched the details.

Java wanted to have better namespace control, so Java has packages.
These are better than C++ namespaces and more like Ada packages. But
the encapsulation construct in Java is still the "class", and in at
least two important senses (there are several) of the value
of "separation of interface and implementation", Java classes fall
short, because method bodies are defined in the class declaration.
(And no, Java "interface"s are not the answer to this).

Java's arrays are bounds-checked.  That's good.  Ada has a more
generalized system of range constraints that is involved with both
arrays and the subtyping system.  This allows for automated range
assertions beyond just for array accesses, and makes it possible for
the compiler to eliminate many run-time array bounds checks.

All these things can be viewed either negatively as half-measures, or
positively as steps in the right direction.  The idea is that Java
incorporated all these elements for good reasons, and the fuller
support that Ada gives them is better.

So that's one way to spin it, what do you think?

-- mark



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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Larry J. Elmore]

In article <3A5B1984.2A6148AF@acm.org>, "Marin David Condic"
<mcondic.nospam@acm.org> wrote:

> Just for grins, go visit: http://www.wpafb.af.mil/jovial/jovialg.htm

No can do. There's a notice that the site has moved to:

	http://www.jovial.hill.af.mil

And when I tryo to go there, I get:

Error 403

ERROR

Access Denied by oogate Firewall



The following error was encountered: 

     Access Denied by Firewall Access Rules. 

Access control configuration prevents your request from being
 allowed at this time. Please call 7-DATA if you feel this is incorrect.


Oh well.
Larry

Re: What to Do?

[John English]

William Dale wrote:
> John English wrote:
> > James Rogers wrote:
> > > I find it strange that anyone is currently considering C#, when there
> > > are NO jobs for that language. I suppose you could tie your future to
> > > your belief in the future marketing success of Microsoft.
> >
> > Oh, I dunno... there are probably companies out there saying to
> > themselves "what we really need is a bunch of programmers with at
> > least 5 years experience of using C#"... ;-)
> 
> So hire Ada programmers ;-)

No, no, no... that's no good at all...

...for instance, where on earth will anyone find Microsoft-certified
Ada programmers, for goodness sake? ;-)

-----------------------------------------------------------------
 John English              | mailto:je@brighton.ac.uk
 Senior Lecturer           | http://www.comp.it.bton.ac.uk/je
 Dept. of Computing        | ** NON-PROFIT CD FOR CS STUDENTS **
 University of Brighton    |    -- see http://burks.bton.ac.uk
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Larry J. Elmore]

In article <93k08f$m9v$1@nnrp1.deja.com>, n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:

> In article <93ikl3$i6v$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> 
>> Perhaps there is a language problem here, go back and reread the
>> posts.
> <snip>
>> Sorry, that's too far from being a parsable english sentence to be
>> comprehensible, perhaps you could write it in French and we would
>> have a better shot at understanding what you are trying to say.
> 
> You extremely often see language problems everywhere :-) Most of the
> english spoken in the world is even worse than that and everybody
> understands :-) I could make an long list of native english people who
> actually wonder if you read things before answering, and see nothing
> in common between short and clear questions and your more than lengthy
> and unrelated answers ... :-)
> 
> May be communication problems between you and a great part of the rest
> of the world is a more appropriate explanation than language problems

It appears to me that everything you just wrote actually applies to
yourself rather than to Dr. Dewar. This has been an amusing thread that
I've only followed out of morbid curiousity about what your next odd
pronouncement will be. ;-)

Larry

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Larry J. Elmore]

In article <3A5B1417.6190CFC@acm.org>, "Marin David Condic"
<mcondic.nospam@acm.org> wrote:

> I agree that it is unlikely, but stranger things have happened.
> Remember that C was around for a very long time, hiding in dark
> corners of the world, before it started becoming super popular.
> Circumstances came about that got it in front of enough people to
> generate a critical mass
> & the rest is history.
> 
> Could the same thing happen for Ada? I wouldn't hold my breath, but I
> think it is possible.

It would be nice, wouldn't it? More exposure would help since it seems
to me that an increasing number of programmers are becoming more open to
alternatives to C++ and Java. IIRC, Linux Journal recently ran a
positive article about Ada in general and GNAT in particular. There
were some mistakes in it, I think, and I thought about submitting a
more detailed and accurate article to LJ. I've been bogged down with
work lately, but soon I'll have the time to actually do it, I hope. :)

I'd be ecstatic if only I could get my employer (Inet Technologies) or
at least my department to convert to Ada. We use a proprietary
"language" based on C (gcc 2.8.1) that might be better characterized as
an API made up of _extensive_ macros. The code base has been growing
rapidly and is getting rather creaky and catankerous because of all
kinds of interdependencies. We'll be making a major effort Real Soon
Now to reorganize and fix everything, but it's going to be a major
undertaking. I'm going to push the idea that as long as we're going
to have to go through this arduous process, it would be to our great long-term
benefit to bite the bullet and also migrate to Ada in the process. It's
going to be a tough sell, that's for sure, especially since I'm a
junior programmer. :-(

Larry

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Al Christians]

"Larry J. Elmore" wrote:
> 
> In article <3A5B1984.2A6148AF@acm.org>, "Marin David Condic"
> <mcondic.nospam@acm.org> wrote:
> 
> > Just for grins, go visit: http://www.wpafb.af.mil/jovial/jovialg.htm
> 
> No can do. There's a notice that the site has moved to:
> 
>         http://www.jovial.hill.af.mil
> 
> And when I tryo to go there, I get:
> 
> Error 403
> 
> ERROR
> 
> Access Denied by oogate Firewall
> 
> The following error was encountered:
> 
>      Access Denied by Firewall Access Rules.
> 
> Access control configuration prevents your request from being
>  allowed at this time. Please call 7-DATA if you feel this is incorrect.
> 
> Oh well.

I got a look at the site before it got closed.  The first page had
a notice that there was an MS-DOS Jovial compiler targeting MS-DOS.
I clicked on that link, but the page it took me to showed some 
VAX compiler or such, nothing about MS-DOS.  

The site didn't have a lot of content that I found, although I might
not have clicked on everything, just some info to let one know that
Jovial was alive. I couldn't find anything to download, any samples 
of jovial code or documentation of any features of the language or
anything else of interest to a software developer besides some product 
announcements for platforms that I don't use.  I think it had some info 
about where to write or whom to call if one had a legitimate paying
interest (ie DOD contract) related to Jovial.

I suppose they got too much traffic or too many calls after the link was 
posted here, so they hid the site to protect national security or the
peccadillos of some nervous bureaucrat.


Al

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <93k08f$m9v$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:

>> Sorry, that's too far from being a parsable english sentence
>> to be comprehensible, perhaps you could write it in French
>> and we would have a better shot at understanding what you
>> are trying to say.

> > You extremely often see language problems everywhere :-)
> > Most of the english spoken in the world is even worse than
> > that and everybody understands :-)

Well not everyone -- I certainly could not understand what
you meant -- too bad you did not take me up on my suggestion
to translate into French, I am sure I would have less trouble
understanding what you are trying to say!



Sent via Deja.com
http://www.deja.com/

Re: What to Do?

[David Botton]

----- Original Message -----
From: "John English" <je@brighton.ac.uk>
> > > themselves "what we really need is a bunch of programmers with at
> > > least 5 years experience of using C#"... ;-)

Sure, I've got years of experience with .NET and C#, it all start back when
C# was called J++ and ran on the Microsoft Virtual Machine. In fact almost
every inovation in C# was already in the non-standard J++.

> > So hire Ada programmers ;-)
>
> No, no, no... that's no good at all...
>
> ...for instance, where on earth will anyone find Microsoft-certified
> Ada programmers, for goodness sake? ;-)

If there was a buck to be made in certifing them, you bet Microsoft would be
doing it.

David Botton

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Ken Garlington]

"Larry J. Elmore" <ljelmore@home.com> wrote in message
news:n6s76.29722$ge4.11799419@news2.rdc2.tx.home.com...
: In article <3A5B1984.2A6148AF@acm.org>, "Marin David Condic"
: <mcondic.nospam@acm.org> wrote:
:
: > Just for grins, go visit: http://www.wpafb.af.mil/jovial/jovialg.htm
:
: No can do. There's a notice that the site has moved to:
:
: http://www.jovial.hill.af.mil
:
: And when I tryo to go there, I get:
:
: Error 403

The "jovialg.htm" file is dated 11-Jan-2001, so this must have happened
right after I looked at it the previous night. I would guess that they just
don't have the new site completely set up yet.

If you go to http://www.wpafb.af.mil/jovial, the old pages appear to still
be there as gzip'd files, at least for the moment.

 chklabl.gif.gz          17-Dec-1999 10:44     1k
 custsupp.htm.gz         07-Dec-2000 14:30     1k
 fordstrb.htm.gz         07-Dec-2000 14:30     1k
 images/                 11-Jan-2001 11:08      -
 index.htm.gz            07-Dec-2000 14:30     2k
 jov_info.htm.gz         07-Dec-2000 14:30     2k
 jovhist.htm.gz          07-Dec-2000 14:30     2k
 jovial.jpg              11-Jan-2001 11:11    14k
 jovial.ppt.gz           17-Dec-1999 10:44   609k
 jovialg.htm             11-Jan-2001 11:07     3k
 jovialg.htm.gz          07-Dec-2000 14:30     2k
 jovialms.htm.gz         07-Dec-2000 14:31     1k
 jovialst.htm.gz         07-Dec-2000 14:31     2k
 jovigoal.htm.gz         07-Dec-2000 14:31     1k
 jovmail.htm.gz          07-Dec-2000 14:31     1k
 jovmailg.htm.gz         07-Dec-2000 14:31     1k
 mips.htm.gz             07-Dec-2000 14:31     1k
 newlabl.gif.gz          17-Dec-1999 10:44     1k
 nsjovlgo.gif.gz         17-Dec-1999 10:44     2k
 risc1.htm.gz            07-Dec-2000 14:31     1k
 seacontr.htm.gz         07-Dec-2000 14:31     2k
 survey.htm.gz           07-Dec-2000 14:31     1k
 surveyg.htm.gz          07-Dec-2000 14:31     1k

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[dmitry6243]

In article <93l6ut$pvf$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <93fnao$49u$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   dmitry6243@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> > To make a language popular,
> > one need advertising. It must be as insolent as "Ada is an extension
> > of C++ especially designed for Windows", then it works.
>
> Of course this is hyperbole, but I see your point.
>
> I think a good case could be made that Ada is Java++...
>
> Ada runs on the JVM.
>
> Java believes in strong static typing.  That's a step in the right
> direction, but they kept the impoverished type system of C++. Ada has
> a type system that's not only strong, but rich as well.  To start
> with, you can have subtypes, and you have the ability to create user-
> defined primitive types, etc.

And since Ada 83, we have "type cloning" which is very commonly used
and is very hard to emulate using "classic" inheritance.

> Java wanted to get rid of pointer-related bugs.  Unfortunately, you
> kind of have to have pointers!

Yes, but rare. BTW (if Robert does not hear us (:-)) I think that Ada
shuld have true subroutine types (not only pointers). The values are
passed by reference (always IN), so in may cases the clusy trick
with generics will be not required.

> So Java is a by-reference language,
> hiding the pointer-ness of everything so that it's impossible to do
> math on pointers.  By-reference languages have their own problems,
> though.  Ada solves the pointer arithmetic problems by distinguishing
> between pointers and addresses, and by defining pointers to be
> something other than scalar types.

Yes

> Java figured out that truth value has nothing to do with integer math,
> so it got a Boolean type like Ada's.
>
> Java believes that support for concurrency belongs in the language,
> not just some random OS library. Java is right about that! They just
> didn't think it through all the way and botched the details.

C's birth-marks (:-))

> Java wanted to have better namespace control, so Java has packages.
> These are better than C++ namespaces and more like Ada packages. But
> the encapsulation construct in Java is still the "class", and in at
> least two important senses (there are several) of the value
> of "separation of interface and implementation", Java classes fall
> short, because method bodies are defined in the class declaration.
> (And no, Java "interface"s are not the answer to this).

Agreed. Packages are much more universal, and child packages are an
excellent idea.

> Java's arrays are bounds-checked.  That's good.  Ada has a more
> generalized system of range constraints that is involved with both
> arrays and the subtyping system.  This allows for automated range
> assertions beyond just for array accesses, and makes it possible for
> the compiler to eliminate many run-time array bounds checks.

Yes

> All these things can be viewed either negatively as half-measures, or
> positively as steps in the right direction.  The idea is that Java
> incorporated all these elements for good reasons, and the fuller
> support that Ada gives them is better.
>
> So that's one way to spin it, what do you think?

Yes, to convince people that know the difference between pointers and
references (:-)).

There is also a vast majority of people that do not
program themselves but still are in the position to decide which
language is the best. Many of them make their decision based on
whatever else, but not the features of particular languages. For them
any lie is suitable (:-)).

--
Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Kevin Rigotti]

mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote in message <93l410$mt6$1@nnrp1.deja.com>...
>In article <932mi6$r2k$1@trog.dera.gov.uk>,
>  "Kevin Rigotti" <rigotti@atc.dera.gov.uk> wrote:
>> Much as it pains me to say so, Ada is not always the most appropriate
>> language.
>>
>> For example, however good the bindings, toolsets, etc that are
>available it
>> is simply easier and more convenient to write X Windows user
>interfaces in
>> C/C++ because that's what the  designers expected you to do.
>
>Does it follow because "the designers expected" you to code in C for X,
>that it is therefore "easier and more convenient" to do so, "however
>good the bindings... etc."?  That's not at all obvious to me.  Am I
>missing something?


No, it does not follow automatically but in my experience it is often the
case.

>
>Is your statement based on actual experience with Ada bindings to X?
No, just on lots of system integration experience.

The point of my posting was the difficulty of getting compilers to talk to
each other, I only mentioned GUI development as an example of why I want to
do it.


>And even so, "easier and more convenient to write" is not the only
>criterion of fitness, would you not agree?  Probably not even the most
>important criterion...

Of course. This is engineering not law, deciding priorities is part of the
job.

>Your statement here suggests to me that you just are not interested in
>GUIs or GUI programming!  You care about "the clever stuff" :-)

True. I'm an ATC researcher, software is just a means to an end (for me) not
an end in itself.

For the systems I write, the input and output are often sufficiently complex
or verbose that they have to be data files, so any GUI would have been
rather trivial and I just use a simple command line interface.

In other areas, the GUI may well be the "clever stuff". Certainly, a full
colour Controller Working Position display with conflict resolution tools,
map overlays, etc, etc is a very complex beast and on the occasions that
we've needed to build them for real-time simulations we've used the best
programmers we could get.

>You haven't substantiated your claim that programming GUIs in C/C++
>is "cheapest and easiest".  You're just saying, "Who cares, it's only
>the GUI -- just so long as I get to write my clever stuff in Ada",
>right?
Careful. That's not what I said.

If it so happens that the cheapest and easiest solution is C/C++ then it
makes sense to use it, particularly when the "product" is the results of
using the software not the software itself.


>Here again, I suspect that by the word "trivial" you mean
>that they are uninteresting to you personally...

No, I mean trivial. In the cases I'm talking about they genuinely are.

>Hence I would expect that I would probably say the class of
>cases where Ada is less suitable is probably smaller than you would
>probably say it is.

Probably not, actually.
I'm struggling to think of things where I would consider that the Ada
*language* was less suitable, it is more a question of cost and availability
of skills.

I've just finished writing 50k lines of air-miss model that I *chose* to
write in Ada ... I'd hardly have done that if I didn't like it :-)

>On a side note -- I originally implemented this licensing component in
>C++, but the integration issues due to platform differences and
>compiler version dependencies in a multiplatform, shared-library
>environment made this impossible, as far as I could determine.  So I
>had to reimplement it in C, ripping out all the STL and hand-coding the
>collection stuff, etc.
Exactly. That's half the point I was trying to make.
C++ is a real pain in the neck ... but it's not going to go away so we need
to work with it.

>Aren't you letting the tail wag the dog?  You're saying that the
>ability to integrate "seamlessly" from Ada to C/C++ is crucially
>important, otherwise you might be forced to implement your "clever
>stuff" in C/C++ just so you can avoid the cost of cross-language
>interfacing to integrate with the "trivial" part, which somehow can
>only be implemented in C/C++.  If it's so trivial, why would it be so
>unreasonable to implement it in Ada, especially if you already have a
>binding that hides the cross-language level of integration from you to
>begin with?

Yes, I know it sounds daft but it happens.

Remember, the original thread was talking about how to improve the uptake of
Ada and anything that might make it easier to convince sceptics that Ada is
easy to mix and match would help with this.

>You seriously have part of your product that is so unimportant that it
>can be fully entrusted to young cheap C++ hacking?  I find that hard to
>believe...
Software's not the product I produce: the simulation results are.

>C++ hacking leaves no time for learning what real software engineering
>is all about :-)  All time is consumed with chasing down link-time
>errors and debugging run-time errors.  Meanwhile it conditions
>programmers to think that nonsense is normal...
:-)

That's when you need an Ada programmer to walk past with a smug grin :-)

Kevin
--
ATC Systems Group, DERA, St Andrews Road, Malvern, Worcestershire WR14 3PS,
UK
Phone +44 (0)1684 89 69 11, fax +44(0)1684 89 41 09
DERA disclaimers and restrictions apply, details on request

Re: JOVIAL (was Do we need "Mission-Critical" software?)

[carr_tom]

"Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org> writes:

>"Robert Dewar" <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote in message
>news:93ihgp$fah$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
>: By the way, regarding current activity in the JOVIAL area,
>: DDCI announces JOVIAL support on their main web page.

>I'm not sure what "announce" means here... according to the description of
>their JOVIAL product line, their compiler was built in 1983! IIRC, DDC-I
>(http://www.ddci.com) bought this toolset from InterACT (which was
>previously known as ACT, oddly enough) some time back. The InterACT compiler
>was the standard for the F-16 software developed at Fort Worth, and there is
>still some software which is maintained using it (less every day, as I noted
>previously). I don't remember exactly what happened to InterACT, but I
>couldn't locate them with a web search.

As I remember Advanced Computer Techniques Corp (ACT) was a wholly owned
subsidiary of InterACT.  My recollection is not entirely clear, but I believe
that InterACT was formed by some guys out of MIT and most of its work was in
banking software.  In the late 1980s ACT did the name transition from ACT to
NewCO to InterACT thereby being reabsorbed into InterACT.

My best recollection is that ACT/InterACT had some money problems from their
Ada compiler development and that they lost several key technical people
which made continued support of their JOVIAL and Ada products untenable.

>As far as I know there are also two other compilers available: the ITS
>toolset managed by the Air Force (http://www.wpafb.af.mil/jovial/) and the
>PSS compiler (http://www.pro-software.com/). These were the same three
>compilers around in 1984 when I was programming in JOVIAL, so there's
>certainly not been much growth in this field. Based on these websites, I get
>the sense that there haven't been many sales lately either.

I hear tell that the people at SEA (http://www.seadeo.com/) are still
supporting the ITS compilers as well as their own. They even have a SPARC
hosted JOVIAL which has a PowerPC target.  (Hi Bob E.)

And don't forget TLD Systems Ltd. (I don't think they have a web presence).

>In their December 2000 newsletter, DDC-I does talk about the use of
>SCORE/ANDF technology to help mitigate language obsolescence issues, and
>says: "The original code may have been written in languages not used or
>taught today, e.g. JOVIAL. Hiring programmers with these skills or even
>training current staff may not be possible. Instead of continuing the old
>language, the new software is written in a more modern language."

Seeing as the ACT JOVIAL 1750A compiler was written in Fortran and assembly
lanaguage it must be really difficult finding programmers with those skills.

> DDC-I is
>also actively promoting their support for moving from VAXen to Solaris, so
>I'd say their opinion of the future of either JOVIAL or VAX is not positive!

As I remember the SPARC/Solaris host was paid for in part by a contract that
involved Hill AFB and basically replaced the assembly language OS interface
routines with appropriate Solaris code.  Seeing as you can no longer buy
VAXen I would view moving to another host as appropriate.

/Tom
--
Thomas Peter Carr                               | I have a dream, ...
carr_tom@si.com                 (Internet)      |       M L King Jr    08/28/63
616-241-8846 / 616-241-7712 FAX (Telephone)     |
Smiths Industries, MS 3D1; 3290 Patterson Ave SE; Grand Rapids, MI  49512-1991

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Georg Bauhaus]

n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
: In article <93ikl3$i6v$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
:   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:

: > Perhaps there is a language problem here, go back and reread
: > the posts.

: You extremely often see language problems everywhere :-)
: Most of the english spoken in the world is even worse than that and
: everybody understands :-)

Since I don't speak English either, I'll try the game :-)

[ n_brunot:
[ as recently as ten years ago ... :-)
[ That explains a lot ...
[ For all the rest, I suggest you seriously consider updating your time
[ scale notions of what's going on in modern softwares :-)
[>>> I thought first Gnat versions much younger but anyway highly obsolete :-

My guess is this:
N, you inteded to be kidding, be referring to the first GNAT
versions as being born only after the "almost-death" day of JOVIAL
and still being considered highly obsolete, while at the same time
JOVIAL is consdidered almost dead for 10 years but still supported
and thus not obsolete? And seeing a contradiction there? Right?

Georg Bauhaus

Re: JOVIAL (was Do we need "Mission-Critical" software?)

[Ira D. Baxter]

We offer tools and services related to porting applications software.
We have some support for JOVIAL.
See http://www.semdesigns.com/Products/DMS/DMSToolkit.html.

--
Ira D. Baxter, Ph.D.,CTO           email: idbaxter@semdesigns.com
Semantic Designs, Inc.              web: http://www.semdesigns.com
12636 Research Blvd. C-214    voice: (512) 250-1018 x140
Austin, TX 78759-2200             fax: (512) 250-1191


"carr_tom" <carr@falcon.si.com> wrote in message
news:3a5f2378$1@news.si.com...
> "Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org> writes:
>
> >"Robert Dewar" <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote in message
> >news:93ihgp$fah$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
> >: By the way, regarding current activity in the JOVIAL area,
> >: DDCI announces JOVIAL support on their main web page.
>
<other discussion about Jovial compiler sources deleted>

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Marin David Condic]

I just double-clicked on the URL I posted and there was a new page there
than the one I originally hit. Perhaps they are just now in the process of
changing the site. Give it a couple of days and see if it gets better.

MDC

"Larry J. Elmore" wrote:

> In article <3A5B1984.2A6148AF@acm.org>, "Marin David Condic"
> <mcondic.nospam@acm.org> wrote:
>
> > Just for grins, go visit: http://www.wpafb.af.mil/jovial/jovialg.htm
>
> No can do. There's a notice that the site has moved to:
>
>         http://www.jovial.hill.af.mil
>

--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey
    and car keys to teenage boys."

        --   P. J. O'Rourke
======================================================================

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[mark_lundquist]

In article <93mqvp$qjp$1@trog.dera.gov.uk>,
  "Kevin Rigotti" <rigotti@atc.dera.gov.uk> wrote:
> mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote in message <93l410$mt6
$1@nnrp1.deja.com>...
>
> >You haven't substantiated your claim that programming GUIs in C/C++
> >is "cheapest and easiest".  You're just saying, "Who cares, it's only
> >the GUI -- just so long as I get to write my clever stuff in Ada",
> >right?
> Careful. That's not what I said.

Sorry!  Maybe I read in too much...

>
> If it so happens that the cheapest and easiest solution is C/C++ then
it
> makes sense to use it,

Yes.  If it so happens.  One difficult thing about Ada advocacy is that
people often think Ada is expensiver/harder when it would actually be
cheaper/easier, but I don't deny that there _are_ situations in which
C/C++ is the cheaper/easier.  Another bummer is the tendency to look
ahead only as far as getting the software to alpha release level and
not considering the rest of the lifecycle...

> particularly when the "product" is the results of
> using the software not the software itself.

Right... that's to the "lifecycle" point.  In this scenario the
software is a one-off, so the values of understandability, resilience
to change etc. that dominate in long-lifecycle projects don't become
significant here.  Significant value from Ada can still be realized in
these projects, but it happens longer-term across many (one-off)
projects -- because then you're amortizing the learning curve of
adopting a new language.  It'd likely not pay off on the first such
project.

>
> >Here again, I suspect that by the word "trivial" you mean
> >that they are uninteresting to you personally...
>
> No, I mean trivial. In the cases I'm talking about they genuinely are.
>
> >Hence I would expect that I would probably say the class of
> >cases where Ada is less suitable is probably smaller than you would
> >probably say it is. :-)
>
> Probably not, actually.
> I'm struggling to think of things where I would consider that the Ada
> *language* was less suitable, it is more a question of cost and
availability
> of skills.
>
> I've just finished writing 50k lines of air-miss model that I *chose*
to
> write in Ada ... I'd hardly have done that if I didn't like it :-)
>
> >On a side note -- I originally implemented this licensing component
in
> >C++, but the integration issues due to platform differences and
> >compiler version dependencies in a multiplatform, shared-library
> >environment made this impossible, as far as I could determine.  So I
> >had to reimplement it in C, ripping out all the STL and hand-coding
the
> >collection stuff, etc.
>
> Exactly. That's half the point I was trying to make.

Just to make C++ talk to C++, I had to make a C wrapper around the C++
class, then make a client-side C++ wrapper that called the C interface,
to make it into a class again.  Sheeesh...

> C++ is a real pain in the neck ... but it's not going to go away so
we need
> to work with it.

Agreed!

>
> >Aren't you letting the tail wag the dog?  You're saying that the
> >ability to integrate "seamlessly" from Ada to C/C++ is crucially
> >important, otherwise you might be forced to implement your "clever
> >stuff" in C/C++ just so you can avoid the cost of cross-language
> >interfacing to integrate with the "trivial" part, which somehow can
> >only be implemented in C/C++.  If it's so trivial, why would it be so
> >unreasonable to implement it in Ada, especially if you already have a
> >binding that hides the cross-language level of integration from you
to
> >begin with?
>
> Yes, I know it sounds daft but it happens.
>
> Remember, the original thread was talking about how to improve the
uptake of
> Ada and anything that might make it easier to convince sceptics that
Ada is
> easy to mix and match would help with this.

Sorry, I lost track of the original thread :-) but in that context I
agree with the point you are making.  I was mostly responding to the
opening comments in your post (which maybe I took out of context).

>
> >You seriously have part of your product that is so unimportant that
it
> >can be fully entrusted to young cheap C++ hacking?  I find that hard
to
> >believe...
> Software's not the product I produce: the simulation results are.
>
> >C++ hacking leaves no time for learning what real software
engineering
> >is all about :-)  All time is consumed with chasing down link-time
> >errors and debugging run-time errors.  Meanwhile it conditions
> >programmers to think that nonsense is normal...
> :-)
>
> That's when you need an Ada programmer to walk past with a smug
grin :-)

With your sick and twisted perspective, I'll bet you do that well...
:-) :-) :-)

Best Regards,
Mark Lundquist


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Subprogram types vs. "limited access" (was Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[mark_lundquist]

In article <93mqhh$4gl$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  dmitry6243@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <93l6ut$pvf$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:

> > Java wanted to get rid of pointer-related bugs.  Unfortunately, you
> > kind of have to have pointers!
>
> Yes, but rare.

I meant for linked data structures... you need by-reference semantics,
or in a by-value language you need pointers.  It's hard to believe
Gosling et al would not see past the C conception of
pointer=address=integer.  For whatever reasons they went with a by-
reference design.  Who can say...

> BTW (if Robert does not hear us (:-)) I think that Ada
> shuld have true subroutine types (not only pointers).  The values are
> passed by reference (always IN),
> so in may cases the clusy trick
> with generics will be not required.

The downward closure thing again, huh?

You have to define this idea of a procedure type to be limited (like a
task) in order to really solve the problem, right?  Note that that
makes anything but an IN parameter illegal, so you also solve that
problem without having to create essentially a new kind of parameter
(as access parameters were).

The first problem with subprogram parameters is a syntactic one -- what
syntax do you use to establish its profile?  Subprogram types as you
suggest are one way to solve that problem, and they seem consistent
with the "Ada way" (every parameter is of a named subtype).

e.g.,

    type Action is procedure (This : in Something);
    type Predicate is function (This : in Something) return Boolean;

Is that the idea?

The conformance rules for parameters of these types would then have to
be more like the matching rules for generic formal subprograms, or
subprogram renamings.  That is, you don't declare a function to be of
type Predicate (per the example), you declare a function in the normal
way and then it matches a subprogram of type Predicate.  Right?

That _is_ a bit of a stretch to the philosophy of the type system.  The
essential idea of a type is that it's a template for the creation of
objects.  Every type in Ada is an object type; this breaks that
regularity.  This would be a type that not only doesn't have objects as
its instances, it doesn't have instances at all!  It's just a vehicle
for carrying around a profile.  So from that perspective it's a little
bizarre.

Another idea that went around, I think during the Ada9x process, was
that of a "limited access" type.  This is a real object type, so it's
more consistent with the rest of the Ada type system.  Limitedness
solves the accessibility problem for downward closures.

Bob Duff wrote an AI on this.  The verdict was that the ramifications
were negligible for implementations that used static links, but would
be quite burdensome for implementations that use displays, so the idea
was rejected.

I wonder, are there any (current) Ada implementations out there that
use displays for nested context?  I'm not a compiler expert; what
factors constrain the choice of static link vs. display?  Are there
aspects of the target that favor one or the other?  I just don't know...

Other access types could be limited as well, not just access-to-
subprogram, and limited access is useful for other things besides
downward closure.  I'd like to see this feature added.

-- mark


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Re: Subprogram types vs. "limited access" (was Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Randy Brukardt]

mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote in message
<93npfn$13d$1@nnrp1.deja.com>...
>I wonder, are there any (current) Ada implementations out there that
>use displays for nested context?  I'm not a compiler expert; what
>factors constrain the choice of static link vs. display?  Are there
>aspects of the target that favor one or the other?  I just don't
know...

Janus/Ada still uses displays (whether that counts as "current" I don't
know).

The primary reason for it, though was in the origin of the compiler: as
a compiler construction class project at the University of Wisconsin.
The class assignment required using displays (presumably because they
were harder to understand). There never seemed to be any reason to
change them. (Besides, I never quite figured out how static links are
supposed to work!)

The Intel processors include some instructions that were intended to be
used to manage displays, but they are slower than the equivalent regular
instructions, so no one uses them.

Unless closures are needed (certainly the normal case), displays are
quite efficient. There are a couple of obscure cases in generics that
require handling closures, so Janus/Ada at least already has support for
doing that. Those cases are (of course) quite expensive.

But the real problem with closures and subprogram types isn't the
closures, its that they pretty much make it impossible to do any sort of
generic body sharing. (Unless of course you made it illegal to use them
in generic bodies, but I doubt very much anyone would stand for that
sort of restriction.) You could only do sharing after you've fully
processed the body, while virtually every approach every implemented is
based in some way on the contract.

There are still a few compilers that mainly use sharing for generics
(Janus/Ada is one of these), and adopting any language feature that
prevented the sharing of generics would immediately make these compilers
unmaintainable trash.

                Randy.

Re: Subprogram types vs. "limited access" (was Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <93npfn$13d$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <93mqhh$4gl$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   dmitry6243@my-deja.com wrote:
> > In article <93l6ut$pvf$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> >   mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> > > Java wanted to get rid of pointer-related bugs.
Unfortunately, you
> > > kind of have to have pointers!
> >
> > Yes, but rare.
>
> I meant for linked data structures... you need by-reference
> semantics, or in a by-value language you need pointers.

No, that's not correct. Look at SETL, this is an example of
a language with absolutely 100% pure value semantics, and it
is perfectly easy to represent "linked data structures".
Consider for example a collection of nodes organized into
a binary tree.

SETL would represent this as a triple of values

the set of nodes
a map from parents to left-sons
a map from parents to right-sons

Each of these is treated will value semantics.

SETL itself is an imperative language, so you can have these
three values in variables, and modify them, but you can apply
this same viewpoint to a completely applicative language,
MIRANDA is an example.

I think what you say is true in the realm of current languages,
which are all at a very similar rather low semantic level, but
as a general statement, it is too sweeping.

(I am NOT suggesting removing pointers from Ada :-)


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Re: Subprogram types vs. "limited access" (was Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <f5L76.231$Br5.104407@homer.alpha.net>,
  "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> wrote:

> The Intel processors include some instructions that were
> intended to be used to manage displays, but they are slower
> than the equivalent regular instructions, so no one uses
> them.

That's misleading. When people talk about displays, they almost
always mean single global displays, whih are updated as each
procedure is called.

The Intel hardware scheme uses local displays, where each
procedure constructs a new copy of the display in its local
stack frame for its own use. This is a very bad method of
doing things period, regardless of whether it is done in
hardware or software.

Many compiler text books still present this entirely poor
way of doing things, and most likely some fellow at Intel
had a compiler course where the instructor stressed this
bad method, and that's how it got into the hardware. The
instruction involved (ENTER with a non-zero level) is
indeed completely useless.

> Unless closures are needed (certainly the normal case)
> displays are quite efficient.

Actually in Ada 83, where pointers to procedures did not exist
(part of the reason for their exclusion in Steelman was an
awareness of this issue), displays are very efficient, much
more efficient than static links. Why?

Because the situation is as follows:

1) with static links, no overhead is required for calls to top
level procedures, but if you call a nested procedure, link
mucking is ALWAYS required.

2) with a display, if you do things right (it requires noticing
a rather special case not discussed in any text book I know of)
then calling a procedure that has no nested procedures has no
overhead, and it is only when a call to a procedure containing
nested procedures is made that display mucking is needed.

Clearly if you have no nested procedures, both methods become
completely efficient. If ther ARE nested procedures, behavior
2) is much more attractive than behavior 1) since dynamically
more calls are to leaf procedures.

> There are a couple of obscure cases in generics that
> require handling closures, so Janus/Ada at least already has
> support for doing that. Those cases are (of course) quite
> expensive.

I suspect that is an artifact of shared generics in Janus/Ada,
I know of no such obscure cases in the Alsys implementation
which used displays throughout.

Personally, I would immediately choose static links if I
decided on shared generics. Furthermore in Ada 95, static
links are really the only approach that makes sense. The
only reason the language was restricted (some would say
crippled, but not me :-) so that displays work was loud
objections from the Alsys and RR folks that their compilers
could not be adapted easily to Ada 95 unless this was the
case.

Note that it is the use of static links that makes the
very useful 'Unrestricted_Access attribute easy to implement
in GNAT.

Robert Dewar

(*) the trick in display management is the following:

The display is used for up level references, but for references
to the current stack frame, you simply use the stack pointer
or the frame pointer as the case may be.

This means you do NOT adjust the current display entry unless
someone might use it. The ONLY case in which someone might use
the entry is if you call one of your own nested procedures, and
if you don't have any nested procedures, then you don't need
to worry about this case.

The normal invariant for a display is that the N'th level entry
is the stack frame of the most recently invoked N'th level
subprogram.

With this (very important) modification, the invariant for
the display is that the N'th level entry is the stack frame of
the most recently invoked N'th level subprogram NOT having
any nested subprograms.


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Re: What to Do?

[Petra Lynn Hofman]

I can't believe this thread!!!!!  I was away for a week and it has gone
on and on.  And there is much interesting and useful information.  What
seems clear to me is that Ada95 is not going to be going places without
a large corporate sponsor who has programmers trained in Ada at the
college level.  I've checked all over the Chicago area and no college or
tech school offers classes in Ada programming.  Therefore, my
presumption is that there is insufficient demand.  It also seems clear
to me that Microsoft is running not only hardware but software
decisions, too.  I think this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Re: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <3A5FCCDC.8E6F67F9@chicagonet.net>,
  Petra Lynn Hofman <petrahof@chicagonet.net> wrote:

> I've checked all over the Chicago area and no college or
> tech school offers classes in Ada programming.

Of course colleges are not particularly in the business
of offering classes in xxx programming for any xxx. They
may be in the business of teaching programming using some
language yyy as a tool, but that's a bit different (and
there are indeed colleges and universities around that
use Ada as the yyy for this purpose, but in the long run
that's a secondary issue. After all for many many years,
Pascal was being used as yyy by nearly all universities.

You will actually find VERY few four year colleges or
universities that teach two of the most widely used
programming languages: COBOL and Visual Basic. If we
look back ten years, then COBOL was by far the most widely
used language (I am not sure of its ranking at this stage),
but it was STILL the case that virtually no four year
institutions taught COBOL.

So what is taught at universities does not necessarily
reflect what is in actual use.

Of course it is desirable that people are exposed to Ada
somewhere during their academic career, and that happens
in even more universities, though certainly not enough :-)


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Re: What to Do?

[Ken Garlington]

"Petra Lynn Hofman" <petrahof@chicagonet.net> wrote in message
news:3A5FCCDC.8E6F67F9@chicagonet.net...
: I can't believe this thread!!!!!  I was away for a week and it has gone
: on and on.  And there is much interesting and useful information.  What
: seems clear to me is that Ada95 is not going to be going places without
: a large corporate sponsor who has programmers trained in Ada at the
: college level.

Although I was exposed to Ada83 in college, very few people we hired in the
'80s had that experience (many of them didn't even have training in software
engineering in college, for that matter). It didn't seem to affect my
company that much -- we just provided our own training (as we do for C++ ,
Java, UML, etc.). You will need more than "a large corporate sponsor,"
however: you'll need *multiple* sponsors for it to be more than a niche
language.

(On a side note: Has anyone else noticed how few of the leaders in the
software engineering field -- people like Watts Humphrey and Barry Boehm --
have ever gone back and taken a degree in computer science or software
engineering? Are there other fields taught in universities now that have
this situation?)

: I've checked all over the Chicago area and no college or
: tech school offers classes in Ada programming.  Therefore, my
: presumption is that there is insufficient demand.  It also seems clear
: to me that Microsoft is running not only hardware but software
: decisions, too.  I think this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Re: JOVIAL (was Do we need "Mission-Critical" software?)

[Ken Garlington]

By the way, I got a message from the JOVIAL folks at USAF... they are
looking into the problem accessing the new site

www.jovial.hill.af.mil

although the message seemed to imply "we're not having a problem (because
we're behind the firewall), so it might not get fixed right away...".
Wouldn't be ironic that a site intended to promote JOVIAL was available only
to people in the .mil domain?

Re: Subprogram types vs. "limited access" (was Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[dmitry6243]

In article <93npfn$13d$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <93mqhh$4gl$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   dmitry6243@my-deja.com wrote:
> > In article <93l6ut$pvf$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> >   mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> > BTW (if Robert does not hear us (:-)) I think that Ada
> > shuld have true subroutine types (not only pointers).  The values
> > are passed by reference (always IN),
> > so in may cases the clusy trick
> > with generics will be not required.
>
> The downward closure thing again, huh?
>
> You have to define this idea of a procedure type to be limited (like a
> task) in order to really solve the problem, right?  Note that that
> makes anything but an IN parameter illegal, so you also solve that
> problem without having to create essentially a new kind of parameter
> (as access parameters were).
>
> The first problem with subprogram parameters is a syntactic one --
> what syntax do you use to establish its profile?  Subprogram types as
> you suggest are one way to solve that problem, and they seem
> consistent with the "Ada way" (every parameter is of a named subtype).
>
> e.g.,
>
>     type Action is procedure (This : in Something);
>     type Predicate is function (This : in Something) return Boolean;
>
> Is that the idea?

Yep

> The conformance rules for parameters of these types would then have to
> be more like the matching rules for generic formal subprograms, or
> subprogram renamings.  That is, you don't declare a function to be of
> type Predicate (per the example),

Well, something like

   Foo : constant Action :=
      declare
         ...
      begin
         ...
      end Action; -- or end Foo; ?

looks a bit indigestibe. Something in the package instantiation / type
extension style:

   procedure Foo is new Action with
      ...
   begin
      ...
   end Foo;

seems also clumsy.

> you declare a function in the normal way and then it matches a
> subprogram of type Predicate.  Right?
>
> That _is_ a bit of a stretch to the philosophy of the type system.
> The essential idea of a type is that it's a template for the creation
> of objects.  Every type in Ada is an object type; this breaks that
> regularity.  This would be a type that not only doesn't have objects
> as its instances, it doesn't have instances at all!  It's just a
> vehicle for carrying around a profile.  So from that perspective it's
> a little bizarre.

Such kind of argumentation seems to be valid against T'Class too.

> Another idea that went around, I think during the Ada9x process, was
> that of a "limited access" type.  This is a real object type, so it's
> more consistent with the rest of the Ada type system.  Limitedness
> solves the accessibility problem for downward closures.

The idea is interesting but, IMO, it is generally inconsistent to have
pointers and have no types they point to. Then from a pure theoretical
point of view, we do want to pass a program as a parameter. One could
even imagine passing some programs by copy in a distributed
environment! Using a pointer instead is a trick.

--
Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Lao Xiao Hai]

n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:

> I read a couple a times the word 'jovial' and thought it was a joke :-)
> I guess you could be ready to invent your own language, used only by
> you, to make proof that there are languages less popular than Ada ...
> Easy way to prove almost any absurd assertion :-)

Jovial or JOVIAL.   Jules Own Version of International Algorithmic Language.

I had several opportunities to sit at the feet of Jules Schwartz, the
principal designer
of this language.  It added to Algol many features that made Algol better
suited
to actual programming problems, particularly embedded systems problems.

There is currently an active JOVIAL Users Group.  I believe they are based
at
Wright-Patterson AFB.  As with many language advocates, dedicated JOVIAL
enthusiasts continue to believe their language is still the best option for
most of
the problems it was designed to solve.    A great many of our USAF software
systems are operated by JOVIAL.

We have a client who is converting a lot of JOVIAL code to Ada 95 for an
important
military system.   I am told that Ratheon is using JOVIAL for the current
upgrade of
the Patriot.  The next Patriot upgrade was planning to use Ada, but there
are apparently
some fools at Raytheon who are advocating C++.  With luck, Ada will prevail.

Richard

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Jerry Petrey]

Lao Xiao Hai wrote:
> 
> n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> 
> > I read a couple a times the word 'jovial' and thought it was a joke :-)
> > I guess you could be ready to invent your own language, used only by
> > you, to make proof that there are languages less popular than Ada ...
> > Easy way to prove almost any absurd assertion :-)
> 
> Jovial or JOVIAL.   Jules Own Version of International Algorithmic Language.
> 
> I had several opportunities to sit at the feet of Jules Schwartz, the
> principal designer
> of this language.  It added to Algol many features that made Algol better
> suited
> to actual programming problems, particularly embedded systems problems.
> 
> There is currently an active JOVIAL Users Group.  I believe they are based
> at
> Wright-Patterson AFB.  As with many language advocates, dedicated JOVIAL
> enthusiasts continue to believe their language is still the best option for
> most of
> the problems it was designed to solve.    A great many of our USAF software
> systems are operated by JOVIAL.
> 
> We have a client who is converting a lot of JOVIAL code to Ada 95 for an
> important
> military system.   I am told that Ratheon is using JOVIAL for the current
> upgrade of
> the Patriot.  The next Patriot upgrade was planning to use Ada, but there
> are apparently
> some fools at Raytheon who are advocating C++.  With luck, Ada will prevail.
>        ^
>        |
         |
Unfortunately, we have a number of those 'fools' here but ,thank
goodness, quite
a few of our missile systems are done in Ada.  Of course when these same
people
work on the Ada projects, their Ada code looks a lot like C :-)

Jerry
-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Jerry Petrey                                                
-- Senior Principal Systems Engineer - Navigation, Guidance, & Control
-- Raytheon Missile Systems          - Member Team Ada & Team Forth
-- NOTE: please remove <NOSPAM> in email address to
reply                  
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[tmoran]

> ... Of course when these same people work on the Ada projects,
> their Ada code looks a lot like C :-)
    There are probably some advantages to using C-in-Ada over just
plain C, but they are surely a lot less than properly and fully
using Ada.  What fraction of "Ada" code is really fully Ada, and
not C-in-Ada or Fortran-in-Ada etc?

Re: Subprogram types vs. "limited access" (was Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[mark_lundquist]

In article <93q393$opo$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  dmitry6243@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <93npfn$13d$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:
> > In article <93mqhh$4gl$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> >   dmitry6243@my-deja.com wrote:
> > > In article <93l6ut$pvf$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> > >   mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:
> >
> > > BTW (if Robert does not hear us (:-)) I think that Ada
> > > shuld have true subroutine types (not only pointers).  The values
> > > are passed by reference (always IN),
> > > so in may cases the clusy trick
> > > with generics will be not required.
> >
> > The downward closure thing again, huh?
> >
> > You have to define this idea of a procedure type to be limited
(like a
> > task) in order to really solve the problem, right?  Note that that
> > makes anything but an IN parameter illegal, so you also solve that
> > problem without having to create essentially a new kind of parameter
> > (as access parameters were).
> >
> > The first problem with subprogram parameters is a syntactic one --
> > what syntax do you use to establish its profile?  Subprogram types
as
> > you suggest are one way to solve that problem, and they seem
> > consistent with the "Ada way" (every parameter is of a named
subtype).
> >
> > e.g.,
> >
> >     type Action is procedure (This : in Something);
> >     type Predicate is function (This : in Something) return Boolean;
> >
> > Is that the idea?
>
> Yep
>
> > The conformance rules for parameters of these types would then have
to
> > be more like the matching rules for generic formal subprograms, or
> > subprogram renamings.  That is, you don't declare a function to be
of
> > type Predicate (per the example),
>
> Well, something like
>
>    Foo : constant Action :=
>       declare
>          ...
>       begin
>          ...
>       end Action; -- or end Foo; ?
>
> looks a bit indigestibe.

A lot indigestible.

> Something in the package instantiation / type
> extension style:
>
>    procedure Foo is new Action with
>       ...
>    begin
>       ...
>    end Foo;
>
> seems also clumsy.

No, what I had in mind was a contract model with matching rules, e.g.

   procedure Foo (X: Something);

would match a formal of type Action in the example.

>
> > you declare a function in the normal way and then it matches a
> > subprogram of type Predicate.  Right?
> >
> > That _is_ a bit of a stretch to the philosophy of the type system.
> > The essential idea of a type is that it's a template for the
creation
> > of objects.  Every type in Ada is an object type; this breaks that
> > regularity.  This would be a type that not only doesn't have objects
> > as its instances, it doesn't have instances at all!  It's just a
> > vehicle for carrying around a profile.  So from that perspective
it's
> > a little bizarre.
>
> Such kind of argumentation seems to be valid against T'Class too.

Kind of, but not really :-).  Objects of T'Class really are _objects_,
even if you can't declare an object to be of type T'Class.  Classwide
types are formally defined to be indefinite, as are unconstrained
types.  So you can't declare an object of type T'Class, for the same
reason that you cannot declare an object of type String.  That doesn't
make String any less of a real object type.

Ada95 defined a new kind of access type, the access-to-subprogram
type.  It's a real object type with real object values, even if the
value is a pointer that denotes something other than an object.  You
propose an altogether new kind of type that is unprecendented in that
it does not describe objects, but subprograms.  It is so unrelated to
the concept of an object type that it doesn't seem legitimate to even
call it a type, except to make the nice syntax for declaring subprogram
parameters!  The tail wagging the dog, in other words.

The concepts of type and object are inseparable.  To have subprogram
types make sense, as a starting point you would have to make
subprograms be first-class objects (not just a new kind of parameter),
and that would be a much different language than Ada.

I guess you could make the same argument for the concept of "pointer",
but I think empirically Ada95 shows that there's enough wiggle-room in
the idea of "pointer" to accommodate access-to-subpgrogram types.

>
> > Another idea that went around, I think during the Ada9x process, was
> > that of a "limited access" type.  This is a real object type, so
it's
> > more consistent with the rest of the Ada type system.  Limitedness
> > solves the accessibility problem for downward closures.
>
> The idea is interesting but, IMO, it is generally inconsistent to have
> pointers and have no types they point to.

Well, access-to-subprogram is here to stay in Ada, whether you like it
theoretically or not :-) :-) :-).  "limited access", at least, would be
a mild extension of what we already have in Ada95.  I'm suprised you
object to "pointer denoting something other than an object" (which, I
repeat, we already have) more than you object to "type describing
something other than an object".  And access-to-subprogram types are
useful for more than just passing as parameters (precisely because they
are real object types).

In terms of the machine model, pointer to a subprogram makes sense even
if subprograms are not objects (and hence not instances of a type).
Subprograms have an address -- or a descriptor, or something that can
be used as an aliasing reference.  If they don't, then they certainly
cannot be passed as a closure!  (For instance, you couldn't pass an
inline subprogram or an intrinsic subprogram as a closure).

Cheers,
Mark


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Tucker Taft]

Lao Xiao Hai wrote:
> ...   I am told that Ratheon is using JOVIAL for the current
> upgrade of
> the Patriot. 

Raytheon has been using Ada 95 for the Patriot upgrade since 1997.
They used a Jovial-to-Ada translation tool to get started, though
they aren't doing any more translation as far as I know.

> ... The next Patriot upgrade was planning to use Ada,

They are already using Ada (unless you are talking about THAAD,
which is definitely not an "upgrade," but rather a different system).

> ... but there
> are apparently
> some fools at Raytheon who are advocating C++. 

Perhaps you are talking about the THAAD?  That is a different
system, though clearly related to the Patriot in terms of
mission.  It is being done in C++ as far as I know.

> ... With luck, Ada will prevail.

I believe THAAD has settled on C++.

> 
> Richard

-- 
-Tucker Taft   stt@avercom.net   http://www.averstar.com/~stt/
Chief Technology Officer, AverCom, Inc. (A Titan Company) Burlington, MA  USA
(AverCom was formed 1/1/01 from the Commercial Division of AverStar)
(http://www.averstar.com/services/ebusiness_applications.html)

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[BSCrawford]

Tucker said, 

>Raytheon has been using Ada 95 for the Patriot upgrade since 1997.
>They used a Jovial-to-Ada translation tool to get started, though
>they aren't doing any more translation as far as I know.

An aquaintance of mine, who works at Raytheon, told me 
(about a year ago I think) that: 

1) The ground-control portion (radars and such) of the Patriot 
    system is written in Ada, but 
2) The onboard flight control portion has always remained in 
    Jovial. He also said that the company had proposed to 
    re-write that portion in Ada, but the Air Force did not see 
    any need to spend the money to do that. 

Perhaps Richard's information concerns portion 2. 

Bard Crawford

Re: Subprogram types vs. "limited access" (was Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <93vonj$3td$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:
> Kind of, but not really :-).  Objects of T'Class really are
_objects_,
> even if you can't declare an object to be of type T'Class.
Classwide
> types are formally defined to be indefinite, as are
unconstrained
> types.  So you can't declare an object of type T'Class, for
the same
> reason that you cannot declare an object of type String.


That seems a little misleading, you most certainly can declare

  a : string := "hello";

and the nominal type of a is indeed string. Note that the
declaration:

  a : string (1 .. 5) := "hello";

is NOT the same declaration, and if you make these variables
aliased, you immediately run into the real difference between
these two declarations.


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article
<4CJ86.129146$A06.4109981@news1.frmt1.sfba.home.com>,
  tmoran@acm.org wrote:
> > ... Of course when these same people work on the Ada
projects,
> > their Ada code looks a lot like C :-)
>     There are probably some advantages to using C-in-Ada over
just
> plain C, but they are surely a lot less than properly and
fully
> using Ada.  What fraction of "Ada" code is really fully Ada,
and
> not C-in-Ada or Fortran-in-Ada etc?


Well I am sure no one has enough experience to answer this
authoritatively, but I can definitely say from seeing millions
of lines of code from our customers that VERY little if any
would fairly be called C-in-Ada or Fortran-in-Ada.

Actually if anything, I get more worried by people pulling
out all the stops and mixing discriminants, private types,
generics, tagged types etc in frighteningly ambitious
combinations :-)


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Re: Subprogram types vs. "limited access" (was Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[mark_lundquist]

In article <9404rc$en9$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <93vonj$3td$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:
> > Kind of, but not really :-).  Objects of T'Class really are
> _objects_,
> > even if you can't declare an object to be of type T'Class.
> Classwide
> > types are formally defined to be indefinite, as are
> unconstrained
> > types.  So you can't declare an object of type T'Class, for
> the same
> > reason that you cannot declare an object of type String.
>
> That seems a little misleading, you most certainly can declare
>
>   a : string := "hello";
>

A little misleading?  That's charitable of you! :-)

> and the nominal type of a is indeed string.

It sho nuff is.

One thing I like about Ada's type theory is how the dimension of
derivation and the dimension of constraints (subtyping) are
distinguished from each other, but fit together.


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Re: Subprogram types vs. "limited access" (was Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <940db0$lut$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <9404rc$en9$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> > In article <93vonj$3td$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> >   mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:
> > > Kind of, but not really :-).  Objects of T'Class really
are
> > _objects_,
> > > even if you can't declare an object to be of type
T'Class.
> > Classwide
> > > types are formally defined to be indefinite, as are
> > unconstrained
> > > types.  So you can't declare an object of type T'Class,
for
> > the same
> > > reason that you cannot declare an object of type String.
> >
> > That seems a little misleading, you most certainly can
declare
> >
> >   a : string := "hello";
> >
>
> A little misleading?  That's charitable of you! :-)

Well for most purposes,

      a : string := "hello";

DOES mean exactly the same as

      a : string (1 .. 5) := "hello";

and indeed in Ada 83 it was EXACTLY right to think of the
omission of constraints as a shorthand (in the constant case).

And mostly you will get away with this view, which is why I
said that it was only a little misleading. But when you mess
with aliased and access types, you get bitten (this is one
of the things that people have quite a bit of trouble with).


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Re: Subprogram types vs. "limited access" (was Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[dmitry6243]

In article <93vonj$3td$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:

> Ada95 defined a new kind of access type, the access-to-subprogram
> type.  It's a real object type with real object values, even if the
> value is a pointer that denotes something other than an object.  You
> propose an altogether new kind of type that is unprecendented in that
> it does not describe objects, but subprograms.  It is so unrelated to
> the concept of an object type that it doesn't seem legitimate to even
> call it a type, except to make the nice syntax for declaring
> subprogram parameters!  The tail wagging the dog, in other words.

What if I'd formally say, imagine objects of subprogram type as
tasks. Each time the subprogram is called, the caller is stopped
and the task continues, upon return task is stopped and the caller
is resumed. Tasks are "true" Ada objects, right?

> The concepts of type and object are inseparable.  To have subprogram
> types make sense, as a starting point you would have to make
> subprograms be first-class objects (not just a new kind of parameter),
> and that would be a much different language than Ada.

If I correctly understand your concern, the problem is to find a
suitable reason to make:

X : A_Subprogram_Type;

illegal (without any reference to the fact that A_Subprogram_Type is
a subprogram type). Well, we could make subprogram types unconstrained.

... and what do you think about:

Y : UNIVERSAL_INTEGER;

Subprogram types seems to be very similar to the universal types.

> Well, access-to-subprogram is here to stay in Ada, whether you like it
> theoretically or not :-) :-) :-). "limited access", at least, would be
> a mild extension of what we already have in Ada95.

I am not against "limited access". Especially if it could be applied
to all pointers. We do sometimes need pointers to subprograms. My
wish is to make this necessity as marginal as possible.

> In terms of the machine model, pointer to a subprogram makes sense
> even if subprograms are not objects (and hence not instances of a
> type). Subprograms have an address -- or a descriptor, or something
> that can be used as an aliasing reference.  If they don't, then they
> certainly cannot be passed as a closure!  (For instance, you couldn't
> pass an inline subprogram or an intrinsic subprogram as a closure).

Potentially, I could pass an inline subprogram by copy! (:-)) Actually
this is an argument against pointers (:-)).

--
Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Marin David Condic]

Robert Dewar wrote:

> Actually if anything, I get more worried by people pulling
> out all the stops and mixing discriminants, private types,
> generics, tagged types etc in frighteningly ambitious
> combinations :-)

It is quite common to see people who have maybe taken an initial
training course in Ada and are then given a large system to write go off
and start declaring types for everything on the planet, etc. And what
exactly is wrong with the type "Integer"? :-)

I suppose its natural human tendency to do this. We learn about a new
tool and then get eager to use it and have to learn from experience when
*not* to use it.

MDC
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
======================================================================

Re: Subprogram types vs. "limited access" (was Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[mark_lundquist]

In article <940n90$tqn$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <940db0$lut$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:
> > In article <9404rc$en9$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> >   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> > > In article <93vonj$3td$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> > >   mark_lundquist@my-deja.com wrote:
> > > > Kind of, but not really :-).  Objects of T'Class really
> are
> > > _objects_,
> > > > even if you can't declare an object to be of type
> T'Class.
> > > Classwide
> > > > types are formally defined to be indefinite, as are
> > > unconstrained
> > > > types.  So you can't declare an object of type T'Class,
> for
> > > the same
> > > > reason that you cannot declare an object of type String.
> > >
> > > That seems a little misleading, you most certainly can
> declare
> > >
> > >   a : string := "hello";
> > >
> >
> > A little misleading?  That's charitable of you! :-)
>
> Well for most purposes,
>
>       a : string := "hello";
>
> DOES mean exactly the same as
>
>       a : string (1 .. 5) := "hello";
>
> and indeed in Ada 83 it was EXACTLY right to think of the
> omission of constraints as a shorthand (in the constant case).
>
> And mostly you will get away with this view, which is why I
> said that it was only a little misleading.

Yes, but what I originally *said* was that you can't declare an object
of type String, which is just plain old wrong.  The two examples of
course are of just such a declaration; whether or not they mean the
same thing is a side issue! :-)

What I *meant*, and what I should have said, is that you can't say

    X : String;

Cheers,
-- mark


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Re: Do we need any Dewar-bashing?

[Wes Groleau]

> I could make an long list of native english people who actually wonder
> if you read things before answering, and see nothing in common between
> short and clear questions and your more than lengthy and unrelated
> answers ... :-)

Robert Dewar may get a bit crusty occasionally.  Most people would
if they had to put up with some of the asinine stuff seen here and
on a certain mailing list.  But his answer is usually pertinent to
the question.

-- 
Wes Groleau
http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~wgroleau

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Wes Groleau]

> Java wanted to have better namespace control, so Java has packages.
> These are better than C++ namespaces and more like Ada packages. But
> the encapsulation construct in Java is still the "class", and in at
> least two important senses (there are several) of the value
> of "separation of interface and implementation", Java classes fall
> short, 

The fact that in Java, "package" is so closely coupled to "subdirectory"
shows that the Java designers had little understanding of the
_difference_ between interface and implementation, so how could they
see any reason to _separate_ them?  More evidence is in the fact that
every primitive type declaration basically describes an implementation
where most type definitions in Ada (at least in well-written Ada)
emphasize the abstractions more than the implementations.

-- 
Wes Groleau
http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~wgroleau

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Wes Groleau]

> Just to make C++ talk to C++, I had to make a C wrapper around the C++
> class, then make a client-side C++ wrapper that called the C interface,
> to make it into a class again.  Sheeesh...

And then folks complain that difficulties
interfacing Ada with C++ shows that Ada
is a bad language.

-- 
Wes Groleau
http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~wgroleau

Re: JOVIAL (was Do we need "Mission-Critical" software?)

[jls]

In article <3a5f2378$1@news.si.com>,
  carr@falcon.si.com (carr_tom) wrote:
> "Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org> writes:
>
> >"Robert Dewar" <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote in message
> >news:93ihgp$fah$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
> >: By the way, regarding current activity in the JOVIAL area,
> >: DDCI announces JOVIAL support on their main web page.
>
> >I'm not sure what "announce" means here... according to the
> > description of
> >their JOVIAL product line, their compiler was built in 1983!

That's true, but it's still going!  The bits don't wear out....

> > I don't remember exactly what happened to InterACT, but I
> >couldn't locate them with a web search.
>
> As I remember Advanced Computer Techniques Corp (ACT) was a wholly
owned
> subsidiary of InterACT.  My recollection is not entirely clear, but I
believe
> that InterACT was formed by some guys out of MIT and most of its work
was in
> banking software.  In the late 1980s ACT did the name transition from
ACT to
> NewCO to InterACT thereby being reabsorbed into InterACT.

Not exactly.  Advanced Computer Techniques was a software consulting
house in New York City that wandered into the compiler product business.
It offered compilers for many different languages by the mid-1980s,
which is when I joined them.  (Other parts of the business did indeed
do banking and other commercial software projects.)

In 1987 ACT entered into a joint agreement with LSI Logic to make
a combination hardware/software simulation system called CASHE.  This
joint venture was named InterACT, so ACT owned part of InterACT, not
the other way around.  Because the Ada and JOVIAL compiler products
were used in cross simulation environments, they went into InterACT
as well.

The CASHE product went through several iterations, ending up as a
software framework product named The Integrator with IBM as the other
investor rather than LSI Logic.  In the end, millions of dollars were
poured into this venture with exactly one $5,000 evaluation copy sale
coming out of it.  A great object lesson in where technology without
competent market analysis gets you!

> My best recollection is that ACT/InterACT had some money problems from
their
> Ada compiler development and that they lost several key technical
people
> which made continued support of their JOVIAL and Ada products
untenable.

No, in fact it was the sales of the Ada and JOVIAL compilers that kept
InterACT afloat during this time.  But by 1991, the situation was
hopeless.  Most of InterACT folded, but the Ada and JOVIAL pieces were
bought by DDC-I.  (Advanced Computer Techniques continued on as an
empty shell of a holding company, until its acronym got co-opted by
that Dewar outfit :-)

Since that time DDC-I has continued to maintain and sometimes enhance
both the Ada and JOVIAL compilers that they acquired.  (I left in
1994 but have been in touch since then.)  For example,
the JOVIAL toolset has been rehosted onto several UNIX platforms
during that time, and has also had a new release put out.  And several
pragmas and other enhancements have been added to the Ada MIPS R3000
compiler.

> Seeing as the ACT JOVIAL 1750A compiler was written in Fortran and
assembly
> lanaguage it must be really difficult finding programmers with those
skills.

The JOVIAL compiler was originally written under government contract,
and as a result you had to use a government-approved language to
implement it with.  The choices were COBOL, FORTRAN, and something
else I don't remember; FORTRAN was the closest to being a systems
programming language!  I agree that writing a compiler in a language
that doesn't have recursion or usable string handling is a really
painful prospect, but it was indeed done.

--
Jonathan Schilling		SCO, Inc.		jls@sco.com


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Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Lao Xiao Hai]

Tucker Taft wrote:

> Perhaps you are talking about the THAAD?  That is a different
> system, though clearly related to the Patriot in terms of
> mission.  It is being done in C++ as far as I know.
>
> > ... With luck, Ada will prevail.
>
> I believe THAAD has settled on C++.

Clearly an irresponsible decision on the part of somebody.

Richard Riehle

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Lao Xiao Hai]

Robert Dewar wrote:

> In article <3A6CEA26.90EACF3D@ix.netcom.com>,
>   Lao Xiao Hai <laoxhai@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Tucker Taft wrote:
> >
> > > Perhaps you are talking about the THAAD?  That is a
> different
> > > system, though clearly related to the Patriot in terms of
> > > mission.  It is being done in C++ as far as I know.
> > >
> > > > ... With luck, Ada will prevail.
> > >
> > > I believe THAAD has settled on C++.
> >
> > Clearly an irresponsible decision on the part of somebody.
>
> That may be a little unfair. Most choices of programming
> languages are made not on the basis of technical excellence
> of the language, but rather on the basis of familiarity with
> a particular language. That's not necessarily irresponsible,
> since familiarity is an important factor.

Perhaps I am being unfair.   However, the current THAAD software
is programmed in Ada 83.  I am not sure that slouching toward C++
is as easy as transitioning existing software to a new version of the
same language.   Am I wrong?  Is it easier to convert Ada 83 code
to C++ or to Ada 95?

Then again, is it unreasonable to expect the decision for a major Dod
weapon system to be made on the basis of technical excellence rather
than on the basis of someone's personal preference for a language that
does more to enhance their resume than to do the job right?

If I am being unfair, so be it.   This is warfighting software.   When
it comes
to war, there is no such thing as fair.

Richard Riehle

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[David Kristola]

On Fri, 26 Jan 2001 12:43:20 -0800, Lao Xiao Hai (Richard Riehle) wrote
(in message <3A71E168.FC629B19@ix.netcom.com>):

> Robert Dewar wrote:
>> In article <3A6CEA26.90EACF3D@ix.netcom.com>,
>> Lao Xiao Hai <laoxhai@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>>> Tucker Taft wrote:
>>>> I believe THAAD has settled on C++.
>>> 
>>> Clearly an irresponsible decision on the part of somebody.
>> 
>> That may be a little unfair. Most choices of programming
>> languages are made not on the basis of technical excellence
>> of the language, but rather on the basis of familiarity with
>> a particular language. That's not necessarily irresponsible,
>> since familiarity is an important factor.
> 
> Perhaps I am being unfair.   However, the current THAAD software
> is programmed in Ada 83.  I am not sure that slouching toward C++
> is as easy as transitioning existing software to a new version of the
> same language.   Am I wrong?  Is it easier to convert Ada 83 code
> to C++ or to Ada 95?
> 
> Then again, is it unreasonable to expect the decision for a major Dod
> weapon system to be made on the basis of technical excellence rather
> than on the basis of someone's personal preference for a language that
> does more to enhance their resume than to do the job right?
> 
> If I am being unfair, so be it.   This is warfighting software.   When
> it comes
> to war, there is no such thing as fair.

I worked on THAAD, and know some of the players in this.  A number of 
them are very good engineers who simply don't like Ada as much as the 
rest of us.  Why?  I'm not sure.  I would also guess that these 
particular people are Lockheed Martin lifers, so i doubt they are 
looking to add C++ to their resumes so they can move on.

As for conversion, i too would think it easier to go to Ada95 from what 
they had previously.  I'm not sure how much the computing hardware has 
changed from Dem/Val to EMD.  If the hardware is very different (and 
several years have gone by since Dem/Val started), the software could 
be in for a major overhaul anyway.

Don't get me wrong.  I think they made a mistake going to C++.  Still, 
i have to wish them good luck, and hope for the best.  There are some 
good people working on THAAD, hopefully they will do well.


-- 
--djk, keeper of arcane lore & trivial fluff
Home: David95036 plus 1 at america on-line
Spam: goto.hades@welovespam.com

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Alejandro R. Mosteo]

En su mensaje tmoran@acm.org ha dicho...
> >P.S. Poor old Jules, it seems sad that there would be people
> >who consider themselves Ada knowledgable who have not heard
> >of JOVIAL :-)
>   Or it's excellent that people young enough to have never
> heard of JOVIAL are using Ada. :)
> 

Me! Me!

------------------------------
Alejandro R. Mosteo
mailto: 402450@cepsz.unizar.es
------------------------------

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Ken Garlington]

"Lao Xiao Hai" <laoxhai@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:3A71E168.FC629B19@ix.netcom.com...
:
: Then again, is it unreasonable to expect the decision for a major Dod
: weapon system to be made on the basis of technical excellence rather
: than on the basis of someone's personal preference for a language that
: does more to enhance their resume than to do the job right?

Well, with respect to the first part of your statement ("basis of technical
excellence,") -- yes, that is unreasonable, since it is generally
unreasonable to make any other choice on a single relevant criteria,
ignoring all others.

DoDD 5000.2-R (Interim), available at http://www.deskbook.osd.mil gives this
direction: "Select the programming language in context of the systems and
software engineering factors that influence overall life-cycle costs, risks,
and the potential for interoperability." Depending upon the situation, this
may or may not be Ada.

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Pat Rogers]

"Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org> wrote in message
news:5sHc6.3635$467.149582@news.flash.net...
> "Lao Xiao Hai" <laoxhai@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
> news:3A71E168.FC629B19@ix.netcom.com...
<snip>
> DoDD 5000.2-R (Interim), available at http://www.deskbook.osd.mil gives
this
> direction: "Select the programming language in context of the systems and
> software engineering factors that influence overall life-cycle costs,
risks,
> and the potential for interoperability." Depending upon the situation,
this
> may or may not be Ada.

All fine and well, but the DoD couldn't enforce a much simpler Ada-oriented
policy.  Why should anyone expect them to enforce this?  IMHO they've thrown
their hands up in defeat.

Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Ken Garlington]

"Pat Rogers" <progers@NOclasswideSPAM.com> wrote in message
news:VyIc6.34$tt4.103883@nnrp3.sbc.net...
: "Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org> wrote in message
: news:5sHc6.3635$467.149582@news.flash.net...
: > "Lao Xiao Hai" <laoxhai@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
: > news:3A71E168.FC629B19@ix.netcom.com...
: <snip>
: > DoDD 5000.2-R (Interim), available at http://www.deskbook.osd.mil gives
: this
: > direction: "Select the programming language in context of the systems
and
: > software engineering factors that influence overall life-cycle costs,
: risks,
: > and the potential for interoperability." Depending upon the situation,
: this
: > may or may not be Ada.
:
: All fine and well, but the DoD couldn't enforce a much simpler
Ada-oriented
: policy.  Why should anyone expect them to enforce this?

Because it gives program managers more flexibility to make smart choices.

: IMHO they've thrown
: their hands up in defeat.

This implies they failed. Considering their original goals, I consider this
conclusion questionable.

Re: What to Do?

[spider_templar2]

Al,

I found your post about the "C#" criteria interesting...however, I
think you might have overlooked one site that does handle the "C#"
criteria correctly...I double checked all the sites listed below in
your post to indeed verify that no one was addressing this issue. In my
searches I found that you were indeed correct except that
Headhunter.NET appears to have adopted the new "C#" technology in
executing a search. - All of my searches failed except when searching
the Headhunter.NET site - Headhunter came back with 2 jobs which
included "C#" in the job description. While there may not be many C#
jobs out there - it appears that Headhunter.NET is making it easier for
job seekers to find these jobs....

ST

In article <3A5D064E.DD5B6D67@easystreet.com>,
  Al Christians <achrist@easystreet.com> wrote:
> James Rogers wrote:
> >
> > I find it strange that anyone is currently considering C#, when
there
> > are NO jobs for that language.
>
> I tried to check your claim by searching for C# jobs.
>
> Dice.com gave me 865 entries in my area alone -- but that included
all
> the C and C++ job listings, and IDK if there were any C# jobs
> in there at all.  Looks like a good opportunity for an Ada programmer
> to write a new search routine for Dice.Com.
>
> Monster.Com gave me no jobs.  It said that it was expecting a closing
> parenthesis.  I hope it wasn't expecting one from me, since I only
> sent it C#, not any opening parenthesis. But just for fun, I asked
> Monster.Com for C#) jobs, (C#) jobs, and C#)))))))))) jobs.  It said
it
> was still expecting a closing parenthesis. Looks like a good
> opportunity  for an Ada programmer to write a new search routine for
> Monster.Com.
>
> HotJobs.Com gave me over 1000 jobs in my area.  Looks like every
> job posting that includes the letter C.  Looks like a good
opportunity
> for an Ada programmer to write a new search routine for Monster.Com.
>
> Next I tried www.Search.ComputerJobs.Com.  It told me that 'It appears
> that your search string "c#" contains one or more ignored words.'
> Looks like a good opportunity for an Ada programmer to write a new
> search routine for www.Search.Computerjobs.Com.
>
> Last chance:  Headhunter.Net.  It says 'Keyword phrase C#.  There
seems
> to be a problem with your keywords.'  Looks like a good opportunity
for
> an Ada programmer to write a new search routine for  Headhunter.Net.
>
> Bottom line:  There may or may not be any jobs.  If there are any
jobs,
> nobody knows about them because they are impossible to find, and
> prospective employers may be having some trouble attracting talent
> through the usual channels.
>
> Al
>


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Java packages (was Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[mark_lundquist]

In article <3A64A94C.F265050A@ftw.rsc.raytheon.com>,
  Wes Groleau <wwgrol@ftw.rsc.raytheon.com> wrote:
>
> > Java wanted to have better namespace control, so Java has packages.
> > These are better than C++ namespaces and more like Ada packages. But
> > the encapsulation construct in Java is still the "class", and in at
> > least two important senses (there are several) of the value
> > of "separation of interface and implementation", Java classes fall
> > short,
>
> The fact that in Java, "package" is so closely coupled
to "subdirectory"
> shows that the Java designers had little understanding of the
> _difference_ between interface and implementation, so how could they
> see any reason to _separate_ them?

Hmmm, I think that may be a misapprehension on your part...

You're thinking of the directory structure of class files, which
follows the package hierarchy.  But that's an implementation detail;
the semantics of Java packages in no way depends on it.

And anyway, finding fault with Java packages for not being an
encapsulation mechanism is missing the point -- Java packages are not
supposed to be an encapsulation mechanism, they are strictly a
namespace control mechanism.  The encapsulation mechanism is the class,
and it fulfills the essential aspect of encapsulation (by means of
private members)...

> More evidence is in the fact that
> every primitive type declaration basically describes an implementation
> where most type definitions in Ada (at least in well-written Ada)
> emphasize the abstractions more than the implementations.

Yes... as I pointed out in the previous post, Java classes don't
provide separation of interface and implementation in some important
senses (those that have to do with textual separation).

Mark Lundquist


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