Re: Open Systems closed to Ada?

[cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!csc.ti.com!til de.csc.ti.com!mksol!mccall@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (fred j mccall 575-3539)]

In <1992Dec4.074834.24047@gvl.unisys.com> lonjers@prc.unisys.com (Jim Lonjers) 
writes:

>It may come as a surprise to many folks that yes, even when people have a
>choice, many choose Ada, and it is not limited to the more highly
>publicized cases of Boeing (777) and Motorola (the Cellular Telephone
>system).

I think the question is not whether many do or not, but relatively how
many when compared to other choices, and what are the jobs it is
chosen for.

>My company sells to many non U.S. DoD customers (FAA in the U.S. and
>several foreign customers).  When we have a choice, we pick Ada.  In many
>cases, we have to sell our decision to the customers.  One rather
>interesting one was to an organization that had passed an "Ada mandate,"
>but the folks who actually had to carry out the mandate did not want to be
>bothered with it.  We ended up having to convince them that their
>organization's mandate was the right decision.

A blanket mandate is, practically by definition, almost NEVER the
'right decision'.

>Yes, rational people do pick Ada, even if it takes more work to convince
>the customer that it is the right way to do business.

>[Just a few words of support for Dave Emery who seems to be under attack
> for his views -- I too have observed the same pro-C militant attitudes.
> Shall I say it?  Yes, it seems to be pretty much out of ignorance.  Most
> of those who are militantly in favor or against any particular thing
> are not all that well versed in the alternatives.

And here we see the militant Ada attitude; if you don't agree with
them that Ada is superior to everything, it must be because you're
ignorant. 

> About the only thing that C has going for it is that it has a large
> trained base of programmers (how well trained, I do not know).  This
> is because most of the schools now teach C as part of the curriculum,
> or when a curriculum does not teach a particular language, C is
> encouraged.  It is also easier to write little C programs than it is to
> write little Ada programs.  

The only thing?  Gee, that sort of begs the question of how it got
started, then, doesn't it?  I mean, why did all those schools start
teaching C and how did it get so popular?

[My school, at the time I went through it, didn't teach either C *or*
Ada.] 

>  However, when it comes to portability, reuse,
> large scale programming of any sort, C really does come up short.  

This does seem to leave a few facts requiring explanation, like how
all those large systems in C got implemented, where the large body of
fairly portable C code miraculously was created and how, etc.

> I agree
> with the commentor that it is such social factors that will be the true
> determiner of who comes out the winner in the "language wars."  Lets not
> forget that COBOL and FORTRAN are still winning by a large margin.

Reminds me of the response someone (Djikstra?  Knuth?) made a number
of years ago when asked what programming languages would be like in
the future.  The response ran something like, "I don't know what
features it will have, but I can tell you what it will be called.
FORTRAN." 

> 
> It is interesting that C++ has invented an inter-language
> calling mechanism.  

Why 'interesting'?  Any language that does name mangling (as C++ does)
is going to need an inter-language calling mechanism to tell the
compiler NOT to mangle certain identifiers so that the linker can find
them, particularly if backward compatibility and the ability to link
to modules of a language that does not do such mangling (C) is one of
the design goals.  This was hardly 'borrowed' from Ada.

> Also that the C community is now re-inventing
> tasking (threads), but doing it differently, but not better than,
> Ada.  

I wasn't aware that Ada 'invented' threads -- I don't believe that
putting them into C++ was borrowed from Ada, either, but rather driven
by the POSIX 'lightweight process' concept.

> There is no doubt that C++ was heavily influenced by Ada --

Well, I don't know about *heavily* -- Bjarne Stroustrup has publicly
stated which ideas were borrowed from where, including those which
were borrowed from Ada (the most useful of which is Exceptions, in my
opinion). 

> the C++ langauge developers admit that they were intelligent enough
> to borrow many good things from many sources.]

This is called 'evolution'.  One would HOPE that any good language was
designed by doing this.

-- 
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
 in the real world."   -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
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Fred.McCall@dseg.ti.com - I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.