Ada PIWG

[ted@grebyn.com (Ted Holden)]

 
From: Steve Vestal, Honeywell
 
 
>As I recall, the Performance Improvement Working Group (PIWG) affiliated with
>ACM's SIGAda intended to collect results for their benchmark suite and make
>these publicly accessable.  Does anyone know whether these results are
>conveniently available (e.g., anonymous ftp)?  Inconveniently available?
 
>An article in the Nov/Dec Ada Letters by Asplund et. al. gives some benchmark
>figures associated with interrupt handling (among other things).  Does anyone
>know if PIWG is thinking of addressing interrupt-related timings in any way?
 
Just when I get ready to leave off the Ada group for awhile, they toss
me something which nobody could resist.
 
Normally I wouldn't cross-post this kind of thing, but I feel the people
in the C++ group need to know the scale of the opportunity which is
here.  The idea of being able to standardize on a single programming
language (assuming that language were good enough to standardize on)
would be of enormous benefit even to many mundane organizations such as
Census, where data has always been generated with mainframes and Cobol
and analyzed with Fortran and Fortran related software, and the two
groups can barely talk to eachother.  The U.S. military has a far worse
Tower-of-Babel situation and has attempted to solve it by creating a
Frankenstein language for all purposes.  The literature and every
conversation I have ever had with real-world people who have been forced
to actually attempt to USE Ada have totally convinced me of the failure
of this project.  By the same token, C++ could very nearly, if not
entirely, fill the bill.
 
PIWG???  I feel the word "working" should be left out of the group's
title;  it doesn't really fit, and it just makes the acronym sound
bucolic.  Kind of like Pappy Parker back in the Ozarks callin the
"hawgs".
 
 
 
     Did you ever wonder why there isn't any such thing as a PIWG associated
     with Pascal, C, or C++?  Why these other languages don't seem to
     REQUIRE a PIWG?
 
 
I'll tell you:  it's because these other languages were  D-E-S-I-G-N-E-D
right in the first place.  For this reason, practitioners of C++
programming don't need to spend three years of "designing" around a
language for every three months of coding to solve problems.  They
simply solve the customer's problems.
 
Ted Holden
HTE