Re: C++ Standardization (was: Once again, Ada absent from DoD SBIR solicitation)

[Shayne Flint <shayne@ainslie.com.au>]

Robert A Duff wrote:
> 
> In article <326B6DFD.732B@ainslie.com.au>,
> Shayne Flint  <shayne@ainslie.com.au> wrote:
> >I and other Ada users I know (and I suspect many organisations quietly
> >using Ada) have felt this way for a long time. We would be mad to go out
> >of our way to convince our competition to use Ada.
> >
> >Ada IS a competitive advantage for many developers including me!

I also said in the same post:

" Having said that, it is of course important to ensure that Ada
development tools continue to be developed and improved. This is, by the
way, going along very nicely - eg. ObjectAda, AppletMagic and Gnat. "


Robert A Duff continued:
> 
> I disagree with this attitude.  Suppose everybody in the world used feet
> and inches to measure lengths, and somebody comes up with a better way:
> meters and millimeters, and so forth, where everything's a neat power of
> 10.  If you're the only company using meters, you're going to have a
> hard time buying nuts and wrenches and so forth.  Even though it's
> better.  The only way meters can *really* be better is if all your
> suppliers adopt it as their normal way of measuring lengths.  Better
> yet, all your employees should have learned about meters when they were
> 6 years old.  Sure, if that happens, then all your competitors will also
> be able to use meters instead of inches, and they will benefit, too.

I'm not sure that you are going to get the world to use Ada. The USA
still uses inches! In any case Ada does interface with other languages
and systems with little effort. If we want to use Win32, we can (it
doesn't have to be written in Ada), we can use Java libraries (with
AppletMagic), we talk to X/Motif, SQL databases, etc. every day. Ada is
compatible with other standards.

> 
> For Ada to succeed, it can't just be better in an isolated sense -- it
> has to catch on.
> 

Well it is catching on enough to survive and that is what counts. It
does not have to be as popular as C/C++/Java. I have spent the last 15
years using, promoting and selling Ada products and I am convinced that
Ada will be around for a long long time, and that it will continue to
develop in terms of tools and understanding in the wider market place.

> If you were the last company on Earth using Ada, then you would not have
> a competetive advantage -- you would be stuck shovelling money into the
> last Ada compiler on Earth.  And it would be buggy and inefficient, and
> the latest and greatest configuration management tools wouldn't work
> with it.

If this were the case, then obviously the use of Ada would not be a
competitive advantage. If Ada were to die, it would not be because of
C/C++/Java (ie. popular technologies) - it will be because better
technology had appeared. Such technology may not be popular, but we
would still use it if it gave us an advantage.

Regards,
Shayne...

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-- Shayne Flint                          
-- Ainslie Software Pty Limited          
-- shayne@ainslie.com.au                 
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