Re: "Forced to Use Ada"

[dougcc@csv.viccol.edu.au (Douglas Miller)]

In article <7682@venera.isi.edu>, raveling@vaxb.isi.edu (Paul Raveling) writes:

> 	Standardization is precisely the greatest danger of ADA,
> 	particularly because the DOD standard doesn't even permit
> 	extensions.

Even?!  This is essential to maintain portability.

>       If we accept the ADA standard we lose the
> 	option to improve as we learn better ways to approach
> 	software engineering.

We only give up the option to do software engineering research on our
production software --- a good thing.  

> 	Suppose somone designed a language provably better than these --
> 	if we mandate an existing standard, such as ADA or C, we risk
> 	preserving a dinosaur at the expense of suffocating mammals.

If ADA is already a dinosaur, what does that make COBOL, a diatom?  Come on,
what about the real world?  Surely it more important to stem the waste of
squillions of person-years used to port software between language dialects. 
ADA is the only language that can currently do this due to the no subsets, no
supersets policy.

I don't believe anyone is suggesting that ADA should last forever.  But it is
a quantum leap over existing production languages, and should be adopted as
the standard for developing production software, until research produces the
next quantum leap.  To quote rjh@cs.purdue.EDU (Bob Hathaway) in article
<6153@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>:
>Does any of the above languages provide all of the necessary and desirable
>constructs to provide well designed software and a method for validating
>correct compilers?  What other language provides concurrency, dynamic
>exception handling, generics, reasonable encapsulation constructs, Adts,
>complete control structures, variable number of parameters with defaults,
>...  Ada was designed to standardize software and it
>could replace almost any language with exceptions being rare.

> 	That's my usual comment about UNIX, but it also suits languages.

An operating system is a fundamentally different thing to a programming
language.  A programming language is much lower level --- this is where
standards are really appropriate (analogy: no two models of motor car are
(or should be) the same, yet many of the basic components conform to
standards that enables a trained mechanic to do basic work on any car).