Re: Perhaps there _is_ a conspiracy against Ada

[clines@delete_this.airmail.net (Kevin Cline)]

Alan Brain <aebrain@dynamite.com.au> wrote:


>
>The first real-world C program I did was in 1980. Since 1983 I've been
>trying to convince C hackers about the benefits of Ada. Those that
>actually were forced to do some real project in Ada were quickly
>converted. But mainly, no-one tried.

All the benefits were there, but you skipped all the drawbacks that weren't
remedied until GNAT and Ada '95.

1. No standard bindings to UNIX or X-Windows or anything else beyond the most
rudimentary I/O facilities.  Every compiler vendor rolled his own.
Portability?  Forget about it.  Compared to Ada '83, porting C programs was
easy.

2. No support for functions as objects.  This made it impossible to write
event-driven programs without resorting to yet another vendor-specific hack.

3. Extremely poor quality compilers.  I know; I tried a bunch of them: Verdix,
Telesoft (before the were bought by Alsys), and Alsys.

4. Ridiculously pitiful debuggers.

5. A complete lack of other supporting software, like performance profilers.

And no one mentions that Ada is no better than C or C++ for storage
management.  It's not a problem in embedded systems, where the problem size is
carefully bounded and dynamic allocation is simply avoided, but it's a big
problem for desktop applications.

Ada '83 had some great features, but it was useless for the vast majority of
developers for these reasons.  When Ada '95 appeared TWELVE! years later,
it was too late.  We know that software developed in C++ can be delivered, but
most organizations have no experience using Ada for commercial applications.
And few companies are willing to bet a million dollars to find out if it will
work.  So stop complaining about lazy C++ programmers, get off the government
dole, and join the real world.