Re: Why Ada is not the Commercial Lang of Choice

[rodemann@mathematik.uni-ulm.de (Joerg Rodemann)]

Dear readers!

I would like to add some comments:

Ralph Paul (repaul@ibm.net) wrote:
> > Right, and naturally the use of Fortran 95 is pretty much universal among
> > Fortran programmers at this stage!

> Fortran 95 is universal especially with those punching card trained
> folks on VMS, .... (:-). Boy do I love those old timer programs =:-( 
> ( Fortran 4 sounds about right, maybe ?)

I didn't know there are already Fortran 95 Compilers...has that standard
been defined in the meanwhile?

> The problem with Fortan9x is not so much with language but with the fact
> that
> most people can still use like Fortran 77. ( Just my daily experience in
> a big German aerospace company). 

There was an article in the last issue of Supercomputing about removing
old features from Fortran to get a really modern and useful language: F. 
I ask thee, why aren't they just using something that already exists, is
tested and has a lot more feature they can imagine at the moment? My opinion
on this is: use Fortran-77 where you have old code...for new things use a
more modern approach: Software Engineering techniques plus a proper language.
(Which might be Ada or something else...no, not C++, at least not before
every compiler is ISO conformant! The missing features do leave me with a lot
of problems an no-elegant solutions. Java may be suitable for small 
projects.)

> C++,... , is the need to teach people to apply software engineering
> skills.
> Learning Ada seems to help in that respect (:-).

Agreed: my experience during my studies was that students are introduced to
those old-fashioned hacking languages like Fortran and C. Although Fortran
may be quite suitable for smaller numerics or when you want to use existing
libraries. But you need months to remove the students habits they gained with
these languages. I believe the use of a strongly typed language with 
facilities for modularization would support the students to develop a sense
for simple and maintainable solutions. Ada might be a proper beginner's 
language (although it is a big language, at the beginning the teacher should
be able to restrict the needed knowledge.) as well as Modula-2/3 or Oberon.
Java seems not very good to me for a beginners puproses because it leeds
to inlinining of everything if they switch to C or C++. I like separation
of spec and body pretty much.

Yours

Joerg.

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rodemann@mathematik.uni-ulm.de | Dipl.-Phys. Joerg S. Rodemann
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