From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: ** X-Spam-Status: No, score=2.1 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_40,INVALID_MSGID, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 109fba,b4d51610b7fa198f X-Google-Attributes: gid109fba,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,18511fda4c2412c4,start X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Mukesh Prasad Subject: Re: Military software computer language Date: 1997/08/04 Message-ID: <33E5EE6A.7318@nspmpolaroid.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 262279265 References: <33e37b55.1473308@news.bham.ac.uk> <01bca099$badb35a0$38c820cc@scott> <33E65CE2.4908@unibw-hamburg.de> Organization: Polaroid Corporation Reply-To: prasadm@nspmpolaroid.com Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-08-04T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Roland Jakobs wrote: [snip] > When you ask these questions, you will understand, why there was a strong > need for standardisation not only for a language definition itself, but > for the compiler and the environment too, as in ADA. Actually, I think one of the problems with Ada(-83) was its attempt to define a common environment. Even today, nobody knows what is a good common environment. Nobody can say for sure what is the best way to do threads, IPC, semaphores, shared memory... At best you might get "I like this approach better". When these problems all have obvious known solutions, it might make sense to put this knowledge into a language. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense to have the language designer mandate one particular solution as the one that everybody has to use in all situations. Ada forced compiler writers to come up with schemes for doing multitasking and synchronization. These schemes went to a lot of trouble to meet with the language's requirements, even if it meant doing something completely alien to the underlying operating system and coming up with something much worse than the native solutions for that OS. It is sort of like if Java had come out in 1985, and tried to force all Windows developers to use and be restricted to the widgets and programming style of XToolkit.