From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_DATE autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 109fba,fa07350fd81f7563 X-Google-Attributes: gid109fba,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,80e8e0df8032d89e X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 1108a1,fa07350fd81f7563 X-Google-Attributes: gid1108a1,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1994-10-26 02:31:10 PST Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c++,comp.object Path: nntp.gmd.de!xlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!math.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!news.sei.cmu.edu!ajpo.sei.cmu.edu!riehler From: riehler@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu (Richard Riehle) Subject: Re: Is C/C++ the future? Message-ID: <1994Oct25.234705.26530@sei.cmu.edu> Sender: netnews@sei.cmu.edu (Netnews) Organization: AdaWorks Software Engineering, Palo Alto, CA References: <383q62$k0v@truffula.fp.trw.com> <388a97$en1@dayuc.dayton.saic.com> <38jmof$111@truffula.fp.trw.com> Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 23:47:05 EDT Xref: nntp.gmd.de comp.lang.ada:16192 comp.lang.c++:76017 comp.object:16614 Date: 1994-10-25T23:47:05-04:00 List-Id: >>In article <383q62$k0v@truffula.fp.trw.com> Brad Brahms, >>brad@truffula.fp.trw.com writes: BB>>>While I'm not an Ada enthusiast, our company is one of the biggest BB>>developers BB>>>of Ada software. I have yet to see any large Ada project finish without BB>>>some other language, usually in the form of C-bindings, to help! That is BB>>>not to say there arn't any, but just a view of what I have seen. This is probably a fair characterization of many early Ada projects. One of early complaints was that Ada compiler vendors would provide a validated compiler with no platform-specific support packages. It became the chore of the compiler user to build such packages, often necessitating the use of pragma interface to C or assembler. Sometimes we even had to use the machine code package, if the compiler vendor were generous enough to include it. This is not a language problem. It is an incomplete compiler problem. If a C compiler or an Eiffel compiler or a FORTRAN compiler were correspondingly incomplete, there would be a howl of protest throughout the industry. Only Ada compiler vendors could get away with this because they ostensibly met the requriement for validation. Sometime in the past two to five years, the better compiler vendors have begun to recognize that applications are not developed as theoretical exercises, and platform-specific environments have begun to appear. With this development, more Ada software can be built without resorting to the use of non-Ada code. The purchasers of compilers need to become more sophisticated and insist that a compiler targeted to a particular computer environment should include packages that support the unique features of that environment. They need to understand that a validation certificate is not enough. For example, IBM's mainframe Ada compiler never included support for CICS or VSAM, an absolute requirement for effective programming OS/MVS. Of course, Intermetrics did provide that capability for its mainframe compiler, so it was a good choice for Ada projects. Richard Riehle