Re: Why Ada is not the Commercial Lang of Choice

[Steve Jones - JON <jon@hpodid2.eurocontrol.fr>]

Dale Stanbrough <dale@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU> writes:

[snip]
> 
> 
>     Mem_Map: Integer;
>     for Mem_Map'Address use 16#B010_0040#;
>   begin
>     Mem_Map := 16#0034_4556#;"

This reminds me of afriend working on the Madrid train system who was
informed that he wouldn't be able to write the controller software in
Ada because Ada couldn't handle hardware correctly.  My mate disagreed
and was given dispensation to prove it.  On one side a team of three
in C, on the other a rather good Ada programmer.

Guess which one came in first and had the least bugs ?  The timescale
differences were very large, mainly because using the Tasking model
the hardware interupts could be abstracted away.

I think Ada's problem here is that no one who has used C actually
belives that a language that incorporates data hiding and strong SE
principles can also access the bare metal effectively. Maybe Ada was
just a little too good.

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