Re: Choosing C++ instead of Ada

[kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <326FCA54.167E@lanl.gov>, William Clodius <wclodius@lanl.gov> writes:

> I suggest a visit to Nullstone's list of compiler companies
> 
> http://www.nullstone.com/htmls/companies/companies.htm
> 
> It lists
> 
> Language	# Vendors
> Ada 		6
> Basic		3
> C++ 		30
> C		50+
> Cobol		4
> Fortran 77&90	15
> Java		2
> Lisp		2
> Modula 2	1
> Pascal	3
> PL/1		1
> 
> Note the C/C++ vendors may be highly agressive in listing their wares, I
> know of Fortran, Lisp, and Modula 2 vendors not represented on the list,
> and some list only their C/C++ compilers and not those for other
> languages, but I suspect that Ada's are also highly agressive.

I can name 7 Pascal vendors, so that list is certainly flawed.

> Still I suspect that any reasonable person would agree that the number
> of Ada vendors is significantly less thatn the number of C++ vendors.

What some of us (reasonable or not) might disagree about is the
interpretation of that difference.  For one thing, C++ covers a
broader spectrum of languages, while Ada has only had two standard
versions.

What might be a more reasonable metric is the number of operating
systems supported. Using only Ada 95 and giving credit for "about
to be available" one can list OS/2, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows,
VMS and Unix and those all have at least some hardware platforms
on which Ada 95 is not available (except for OS/2 which only has
one currently available hardware platform).  There is no available
Ada 95 on OS/400, MVS or HP-MPE, all of which have C++ available.

Larry Kilgallen