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From: spf@moss.ATT.COM
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,sci.space,sci.space.shuttle
Subject: Re: "C" vrs ADA
Message-ID: <12659@clyde.ATT.COM>
Date: Fri, 21-Aug-87 11:27:45 EDT
Article-I.D.: clyde.12659
Posted: Fri Aug 21 11:27:45 1987
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Reply-To: spf@moss.UUCP (Steve Frysinger)
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Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Whippany NJ
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In article <203@trwrc.UUCP> agnew@trwrc.UUCP (R.A. Agnew) writes:
>In article <12513@clyde.ATT.COM>, spf@moss.ATT.COM writes:
>> The DoD > doesn't much like C from a lifecycle point of view, but has trouble
>> denying its availability and current performance advantage over Ada
>> (just like assembly with respect to FORTRAN 20+ years ago).
>What performance advantage?? The DEC Vax Ada compiler generates tighter code than the 
>Vax C compiler (no slouch) not to mention the fact that I generate code 5 to 10
>times faster in Ada due to problem level abstraction and re-use.

This may well be true by now.  And that's my point.  In the earliest
days of High Order Languages, assembly language was perceived to
offer a performance advantage, albeit with a nuisance factor.  My
claim is that C is in that position now.  Sure, some Ada compilers
(probably the DEC compiler gets the best performance reviews I've
seen) will out-perform some C compilers (don't know about DEC's).
On my PDP-11/23 at home, my DEC Pascal compiler beats the pants off
Whitesmith's C.  This has little to do with the languages, and much
to do with both the quality of the compilers and the architecure of
the target machines.

Anyway, I still think you'd be wise to learn both (my "pet" language
is Pascal 'cause I can throw code together fairly casually, and
the compiler will tell me if I did something dumb; but I'm learning
C and Ada anyway, and I don't even want to be a programmer when I grow
up!)

By the way, it's worth pointing out that this whole discussion more
or less ignores the advanced computing architectures found in DoD
environments.  Anybody out there programming parallel processors
in Ada?  Or C?  There's a lot of microcode floating around yet,
not to mention things like the dataflow language SPGN, &c.  This
whole language discussion has kind of neglected the fact that
computer architecture (especially for high-performance embedded
systems) is in a transition period too.

Steve Frysinger