Re: Ada in a C++ Interview

[netcomsv!jls@decwrl.dec.com (Jim Showalter)]

yow@sweetpea.jsc.nasa.gov (Bill Yow) writes:

>it turns out that the only people that are doing Ada 
>programming of Crays happpen to be oil companies.

Well, this is hardly something to be ashamed of (assuming this
is true)--commercial organizations using Ada by _choice_ are
even better than DoD folks using Ada. This is especially nice
in this particular case because I keep hearing that "only FORTRAN"
is suitable for vectorizing stuff on Crays (obvious malarkey, since
Ada is inherently vectorizable [can you say "tasking"], but what
the heck).

>The DoD guy was saying, "Yeah, we don't do any Ada programming."  
>And I said, "Wait a minute. Isn't it your langauge?" And he said, 
>"Yeah, but all of our people got exceptions, so we don't have to."  
>Nobody wants to use it inside the DoD.

>Any comments?

Yeah: the guy from the DoD is an ignoramus. If anything, the Ada
mandate continues to get stronger every year, and the proportion of
DoD software written in Ada continues to increase at the expense of
other languages. Furthermore, the number of waivers continues to
drop, heading toward zero as the number of lame excuses dries up
("There are no compilers", "There are no tools", "It's not fast
enough", etc).
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