Re: Why Ada is not the Commercial Lang of Choice

["Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz" <nospam@gsg.eds.com>]

Paul Van Bellinghen wrote:
> 
> 1. Ada is not and never was a programmer's language. 

I've only been programming since 1960, but IMHO Ada is much more of a
programmer's
language than is C. At least Ada 83 is; I know 95 only from reading,
which often doesn't convey the full flavor. Please don't confuse
"programmer" with "hacker"; a programmer is concerned with issues of
maintainability and code reuse.

They started us on machine language so that we would appreciate the
assembler, and
ever since then I have felt that the computer should relieve the
programmer of the
grunt work as much as the state of the art allows.

Now, I am not saying that Ada is my favorite language (I prefer PL/I),
or that it is
universal (ICON and SETL do much better in theri respective domains), or
that Ada is
perfect (I could criticize it at great length.) But it *is* very much a
programmers language.

> It is excessivly type-casted and cumbersome to use.

"Execessively" is such a subjective term; while there may be area's
where Ada's type
rules are poorly thought out, there are areas where they could usefully
be tightened.
As for cumbersome, I found C to be far more cumbersome than Ada.
 
> 2. Ada is realy a high level language. C is more intermediate level.
> This makes C more well suited to real-time embedded systems that are
> really electronic products that use microprocessors to control
> electronic devices in a functional manner. It is much easier in C, for
> example, to output a data word to an I/O device that is memory mapped.

You mean like display buffers? I not only used Ada for that, but my Ada
version was
faster than the assembler version it replaced.
 
-- 

                        Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
                        Senior Software SE

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