Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Ejon <ejones7@ibm.net>]

robin wrote:
> 
>         dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
> 
>         >robin says
> 
>         >>You'll find those attributes in PL/I, which has traditionally
>         >>been used for building large systems.  Probably the most
>         >>widely-known of these projects is the Multics system.>>
> 
>         >Surely you can do better than that for an examle. TO contest people's
>         >(erroneous) view that a language is dead, it is not helpful to point
>         >to a system that was itself pretty much a failure, and which is most
>         >certainly itself dead now.
> 
> Ever been kicked by a dead horse?
> 
> If PL/I is dead, then it's behaving in an uncharacteristic way.
> Much like: COBOL is dead, long live COBOL.
> 
> FYI, IBM has recently released PL/I on the Windows 95 and NT
> platforms.   Shortly before that, PL/I was released on AIX.
> 
> And the compiler is being ported to the mainframe.  So there's
> plenty of action on the PL/I front.
> 
> Some of the action is evident in PL/I job postings, and in
> new work.
> 
> But to the point.  The original poster was concerned that there
> might not be support for Ada in 10 years time.
> 
> I pointed out that IBM was behind developent and support of its
> PL/I compilers, with new offerings and enhancements in the
> past few years, that the support is ongoing, & that the
> language had been around for some 30 years.
> 
> PL/I has many of the features that the original poster
> considered important.
> 
> And IBM is not the only vendor . . . there's UniPrise, which
> has PL/I for Digital machines, and Liant for unix machines  ....

Just curious, but didn't Multics go on to be reincarnated
as "Unix"?