Re: Gauntlet gathering rust and dust

[sdd.hp.com!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uchinews!news@hplabs.hpl.hp.com (Bob Hatha]

  [Since I had this marked for some unknown reason, why not: Sarcasm mode on]

In article <1993Jul23.011508.9410@iplmail.orl.mmc.com> jcrigler@theopolis.orl.m
mc.com (Jim Crigler) writes:
>...
>of a handful of others.  Now Booch, in _Software_Engineering_with_Ada_
>was espousing an object-oriented approach back in the mid-'80's
>(and we didn't know he was that old :-).  Have you guys not read
>it?  (Or _Software_Components_with_Ada, or _Object_Oriented_Design_
>[which used Ada as one of 5 application languages]).

I read all of these a long time ago; great for Ada and Modula programming
(with ADT's and later OO).

>...
>pragma MODE (SARCASM, 0.5);
>
>Or do you just think your products can't make it in the real world?
>Or are you trying to keep Ada secret?
>
>pragma MODE (SARCASM, 0.0);
>
>Am I missing something?

pragma MODE (SARCASM, 0.5);

While Ada may just now be gaining some respect, it did have generics
(templates), exception handling (sound familiar?), packaging (still missing
in many languages), and even tasking (for concurrent programming) back in
the early 80's, back before OO had such constructs.  Since these facilities
are just now becomming available in mainstream OO, one could say being ahead
of its time was Ada's biggest problem (in some respects, anyway).

And now that Ada is adding class-wide types, which provide the kind of
polyorphism and message passing I've advocated (for some time) as preferable
to downcasting and typecases, its actually leaving some of the statically
typed OO languages behind (are the ANSI committees for these languages
listening?-)

If your favorite language (just what is that anyway, Jim) is missing any
of the aforementioned capabilities, why pick on Ada?  And on keeping Ada
secret, Ada's use is mandated by the government and military because of its
emphasis on reliable, large-scale software development, a lot of which is
classified.  That's why many of the published statistics on programming
language usage seem cockeyed to me, they obviously have a low content
validity, meaning they aren't necessarily representative of what's actually
being used.

pragma MODE (SARCASM, 0.0);

bob