From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.0 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_20 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: 2 Sep 93 20:10:24 GMT From: darwin.sura.net!source.asset.com!cernosek@gatech.edu (Gary J. Cernosek) Subject: Re: Computational scientists ignoring and ignored by Ada Message-ID: <1993Sep02.201024.44276@source.asset.com> List-Id: In article vanscoy@cs.wvu.wvnet.edu (Frances L VanScoy ) writes: >We who have an appreciation for Ada and software engineering and >experience in scientific computing need to continue to encourage >parallel computer vendors and Ada compiler vendors to provide Ada >compilers for parallel computers. In an effort to build on the points being made in this thread, I wanted to make reference to the latest Communications of the ACM (Sept. '93). The issue's theme is "Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming." After a quick glance through the eight articles presented on the subject, I saw little mention of Ada. Now obviously, since Ada is not quite yet in the category of an "object-oriented programming language," it might make sense to exclude it in this issue. But with the new OO features of Ada 9X on the way, Ada could (and should) become a real player in this barely touched market of integrating object technology and concurrent programming. We all know that in spite of its shortcomings in the tasking model, Ada does represent 10+ years of experience with concurrent programming within a STANDARD programming language. I emphasize "standard" here because I see that several of the CACM articles are based on unique, non-standard, or otherwise disjoint extensions to existing languages. This is indeed one area in which Ada has a discriminator -- that is, in integrating concurrent programming constructs directly into the standard source code language. The reason why I wanted to make these points is that I think the Ada community should capitalize on both the technical and the marketing opportunities associated with this subject. Assuming one believes that the future of computing rests in parallel processing technologies, and that the object paradigm is here to stay (at least for a while), the convergence of the two presents a real growth potential for languages such as Ada. I think that with Ada 9X enabling Ada to escape the "...but it's not really object-oriented" syndrome, the next technical (and marketing) challenges lie in exploring exactly how to integrate Ada's new OO features with its old (and new) concurrent programming mechanisms. Now, I know that some work has already been done by Colin Atkinson and David Weller in this very subject, and will in fact appear in this year's Tri-Ada proceedings. And there does indeed appear to be some significant technical issues facing the integration effort. However, with all of the (mostly negative) rhetoric that I see in this newsgroup regarding Ada's marketability, I thought I'd try to generate some discussion on what to do about the future of Ada that doesn't pertain to the mandate issue :-). -- Gary J. Cernosek Fastrak Training Inc. Houston Office: (713) 280-4768 E-mail: cernosek@source.asset.com