Re: Robert Dewar's great article about the Strengths of Ada over other langauges in multiprocessing!

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Sun, 9 Mar 2008 06:32:29 -0700 (PDT), Maciej Sobczak wrote:

> On 9 Mar, 04:15, "Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam.jrcarter....@spam.acm.org>
> wrote:
> 
>> You may have been writing multithreaded SW in C plus a threading library, or in
>> C++ plus a threading library, but you haven't been writing it in C or C++.
> 
> You are right.
> In the same way, nobody every wrote a GUI program in Ada, nor a
> networking program, nobody did any cryptography in Ada, etc. These
> languages are almost completely useless nowadays, sigh.

There is a danger of making a logical error here. Cryptography is
computable (except for true random generators), tasking is not. Real-time
clock isn't as well. GUI and networking are border cases. Broadly they are
much less troublesome because their primitives being wrapped into
subprograms are well composable. Concurrency primitives aren't. That's IMO
the reason why I/O was removed from programming languages since PL/1. 

Arguably GUI are close now to make their comeback. GUI libraries are just
so awful, that one might consider language primitives for. As a response
there exist lots of languages for GUI design (LabView, for example). 

Certainly everybody would agree that sockets should be a standard Ada
library and this is easier to do because Ada has tasking support.

> I accept this way of reasoning - but it does not change anything in
> the industry practice.

Right. In industry one first chooses a low-cost processor, and chances are
extremely high that there is no Ada support for it. Industry does not care
about threading in particular and software developing in general.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de