Re: Ada's (in)visibility in the engineering community

[caen!hellgate.utah.edu!fcom.cc.utah.edu!val@uunet.uu.net (Val Kartchner)]

jcc@well.sf.ca.us (John Christopher Copella) writes:
: 
: I've always felt a mandate was inappropriate.  The DoD should simply
: leak a clever story, which could go something like this:
: 
: "Ada was not developed by Ichbiah, Firth, et. al as the result of
: a conscious engineering effort.  In fact, Ada was hacked together
: by a couple of guys who needed a real-time OS for their PDP-8.  The
: real-time OS was needed so they could play games, and do a little
: programming on the side..."
 
A story alone will not change attitudes about Ada.  There is a big difference
between saying that you've written an operating system in a language and
actually writing a commercially viable operating system in a language.

A major superiority claim can be made on behalf of C's real-time ability over
Ada's real-time ability in that families of commerically viable (meaning
actually FAST) operating systems have been written using C.  While it may be
theoretically possible (ha ha) to do so in Ada, it hasn't been done.  C++,
C's successor, has also been used to write System V Release 4 on Unix which
is already a commercially viable and successful product.
--
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