Re: Admiral Tuttle

[magnesium.club.cc.cmu.edu!news.sei.cmu.edu!ajpo.sei.cmu.edu!progers@uunet .uu.net (Pat Rogers)]

In article <1993Jul6.203058.4738@oracorp.com> davidg@oracorp.com (David Guaspar
i) writes:

>Apologies if some version of this message has already been posted to
>this group without my noticing it.  This comes from a Responsible
>Party, so I assume it's accurate.  I've omitted the Party's name only
>because I wasn't explicitly told to not to.  I know nothing about
>Admiral Tuttle or the SEW Technical Conference.  
>
>------- Forwarded Message
>

 [much verbage deleted]

>Object-oriented methods  have  proven  effective  for  development  of large
>industrial  applications  and  have  features  well  suited  to  our goal of
>software reuse.  We are already employing networks of distributed computers,
>and  the next generation desktop machines will almost certainly be massively
>parallel  processors.   ADA  does  not  effectively  support object-oriented
>programming  --  distributed  computing -- and massively parallel processors
>now  --  and  ADA  9X  will  not  provide  many  capabilities already widely
>available through C++ and parallel implementations of C.
>

It would appear that Adm. Tuttle's speech writer is less than well informed.
Ada supports object-oriented programming very well, as defined by those who
care about encapsulation, abstraction and information-hiding.  Certainly
the language does not support inheritance-oriented programming very
well, but I like the 9X approach better than that of C++.  As for support
for distributed programming, there are at least two vendors with products
supporting distribution, and we implemented embedded distributed Ada way
back there in 1991 (available thru Wright-Pat AFB).  As for parallel
processing, Concurrent C is the only version of C that is even close to
the support offered by Ada, and it is not exactly widely used.  The
common C++ library approaches I have seen are limited to supporting
coroutines -- hardly appropriate for massively parallel architectures.
No, Ada 83/9X is'nt/won't be pefect. I just wish those who address
technical topics would do their homework.

pat rogers
progers@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu
These opinions are my own (who else would want them). I am in no way
affiliated with the AJPO, the SEI or CMU.