Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Marin David Condic, 561.796.8997, M/S 731-96]

John English <je@BTON.AC.UK> writes:
>Marin David Condic, 561.796.8997, M/S 731-96 (condicma@PWFL.COM) wrote:
>:     [...] There's a non-trivial
>:     number of people who keep alive Shakespearian English and some of
>:     them get paid pretty darned well for doing so (Ask Charleton
>:     Heston to come speak some Shakespear at you and see what the bill
>:     is likely to be :-)
>
>Charlton Heston doing Shakespeare? Ugh! That's like asking a
>Cobol programmer to write Ada, or Neil Diamond to sing Gilbert
>and Sullivan... :-)
>
    Well, being an ex-Cobol programmer (recovering Cobol programmer?)
    who writes Ada, I suppose I should take umbrage ;-)

    Actually, having read Charlton Heston's autobiography, I know that
    he has always had a keen interest in Shakespeare and has done
    quite a bit of it on stage. Of course, that doesn't automatically
    make him good at it, but it does mean he has had ample practice.
    And the bill for his time is going to be hefty even if he does it
    badly :-) (Mel Gibson did a passable job of Hamlet, eh?)

    As for Neil Diamond mixing it up with Gilbert and Sullivan - I
    suppose you have a point. But I was never particularly fond of any
    of those guys.

    Of course, all this is rather badly off-topic. (My having lost
    interest in trying to make my point - whatever that was,
    originally. Oh yeah. That languages never really "die" - or at
    least we'd better have a good understanding of what it means to be
    "dead" before trying to answer the question: "Is Ada likely to
    survive?" - which, I seem to recall, was the subject line of all
    this, wasn't it?) Off-topic, yet entertaining.

    MDC

Marin David Condic, Senior Computer Engineer     ATT:        561.796.8997
Pratt & Whitney GESP, M/S 731-96, P.O.B. 109600  Fax:        561.796.4669
West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600                  Internet:   CONDICMA@PWFL.COM
===============================================================================
    I wish I loved the human race
    I wish I loved its silly face
    I wish I liked the way it walks
    I wish I liked the way it talks
    And when I'm introduced to one,
    I wish I thought 'What jolly fun!'

        --  Sir Walter Raleigh
===============================================================================

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Robert Dewar]

John said

<<>Charlton Heston doing Shakespeare? Ugh! That's like asking a
>Cobol programmer to write Ada, or Neil Diamond to sing Gilbert
>and Sullivan... :-)>>

I have no opinion about whether Mr. Diamond could sing G&S, but
it is clear that COBOL (please spell the name of the language correctly
in a group which is so sensitive about the spelling of Ada (*)) programmers
can and have written successful Ada code. Indeed this is the case in at least
one of the important deployed mission critical systems in the DoD -- it was
an Ada 95 program, large parts of which were written by programmers whose
previous experience was in COBOL.

In fact such statements about COBOL are almost always made out of ignorance
by people who simply do not know COBOL. 

(*) COBOL is *not* a woman's name :-)

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Jerry van Dijk]

In article <dewar.871740376@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu writes:

>(*) COBOL is *not* a woman's name :-)

No, but there definitively is a feminine connection...

:-))

--

-- Jerry van Dijk | Leiden, Holland
-- Consultant     | Team Ada
-- Ordina Finance | jdijk@acm.org

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[No Spam]

Jerry van Dijk wrote:
> 
> In article <dewar.871740376@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu writes:
> 
> >(*) COBOL is *not* a woman's name :-)
> 
> No, but there definitively is a feminine connection...
> 
> :-))

I thought this newsgroup went around the block on this one a while ago.
Seems we had a debate about the capitalization of Fortran, etc. and it
was concluded with some formal reference to some standard somewhere that
yes, indeed, FORTRAN can now legally be spelled Fortran because it had
stopped being an acronym and had become a noun. (Seems like it was
Robert Dewar who came up with the reference too. Maybe he can refresh my
memory...:-) Well, I don't know if Cobol (COBOL?) has met with the same
or similar standards committee, but it would seem that if FORTRAN can
become Fortran because it is now a noun, then COBOL can become Cobol for
similar reasons. In the abscence of a formal committee hearing on the
legality of saying "Cobol" I intend to continue to do so. If the keepers
of gramatical correctness want to prosecute me, so be it.

MDC

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[John English]

No Spam (Die_Spammer@flinet.com) wrote:
: I thought this newsgroup went around the block on this one a while ago.
: Seems we had a debate about the capitalization of Fortran, etc. and it
: was concluded with some formal reference to some standard somewhere that
: yes, indeed, FORTRAN can now legally be spelled Fortran because it had
: stopped being an acronym and had become a noun. (Seems like it was
: Robert Dewar who came up with the reference too. Maybe he can refresh my
: memory...:-) Well, I don't know if Cobol (COBOL?) has met with the same
: or similar standards committee, but it would seem that if FORTRAN can
: become Fortran because it is now a noun, then COBOL can become Cobol for
: similar reasons. In the abscence of a formal committee hearing on the
: legality of saying "Cobol" I intend to continue to do so. If the keepers
: of gramatical correctness want to prosecute me, so be it.

Hey, is this a newsgroup for a case-insensitive language or what?

Redirect followups to comp.lang.c/c++/java if not please... :-)

---------------------------------------------------------------
 John English              | mailto:je@brighton.ac.uk
 Senior Lecturer           | http://www.comp.it.bton.ac.uk/je
 Dept. of Computing        | fax: (+44) 1273 642405
 University of Brighton    |
---------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Mike Stark]

Jerry van Dijk wrote:
> 
> In article <dewar.871740376@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu writes:
> 
> >(*) COBOL is *not* a woman's name :-)
> 
> No, but there definitively is a feminine connection...
> 
> :-))
Is Amazing Grace the feminine connection too which you are refering??

If so, check this out -- the USS Hopper is being commissioned 9/6/97!

http://www.navsea.navy.mil/hopper/

> 
> --
> 
> -- Jerry van Dijk | Leiden, Holland
> -- Consultant     | Team Ada
> -- Ordina Finance | jdijk@acm.org

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Stark                                                  
NASA/GSFC                                           
Phone: (301) 286-5048                                   Code 551
Fax:    (301) 286-0245                                   Greenbelt, MD
20771
 e-mail: michael.e.stark@gsfc.nasa.gov
"I don't give them hell.  I tell the truth and they THINK it's hell!" 
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Jerry van Dijk]

In article <33F9FF53.185B@gsfc.nasa.gov> michael.e.stark@gsfc.nasa.gov writes:

>Jerry van Dijk wrote:
>>
>> In article <dewar.871740376@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu writes:
>>
>> >(*) COBOL is *not* a woman's name :-)
>>
>> No, but there definitively is a feminine connection...
>>
>> :-))

>Is Amazing Grace the feminine connection too which you are refering??

Of course,

>
>If so, check this out -- the USS Hopper is being commissioned 9/6/97!
>
>http://www.navsea.navy.mil/hopper/

Nice! and a proper tribute. Our ships are still called after 16th
century admirals.

Jerry.
(formerly Royal Dutch Navy)

--

-- Jerry van Dijk | Leiden, Holland
-- Consultant     | Team Ada
-- Ordina Finance | jdijk@acm.org

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[John English]

Jerry van Dijk (jerry@jvdsys.nextjk.stuyts.nl) wrote:
: In article <dewar.871740376@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu writes:

: >(*) COBOL is *not* a woman's name :-)

: No, but there definitively is a feminine connection...
: :-))

Joint Economic and Accountancy Notation perhaps? :-)

---------------------------------------------------------------
 John English              | mailto:je@brighton.ac.uk
 Senior Lecturer           | http://www.comp.it.bton.ac.uk/je
 Dept. of Computing        | fax: (+44) 1273 642405
 University of Brighton    |
---------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[John English]

Robert Dewar (dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu) wrote:
: John said

: <<>Charlton Heston doing Shakespeare? Ugh! That's like asking a
: >Cobol programmer to write Ada, or Neil Diamond to sing Gilbert
: >and Sullivan... :-)>>

Fun to go offtopic about Charlton's thespian talents, isn't it?

: I have no opinion about whether Mr. Diamond could sing G&S, but

or Abba (no idea about case; is it ABBA? :-) ND was plucked out of thin
air; think of someone whose singing you hate...

: it is clear that COBOL (please spell the name of the language correctly
: in a group which is so sensitive about the spelling of Ada (*)) programmers

Oops! Since FORTRAN slipped to Fortran I've grown careless...

: can and have written successful Ada code. Indeed this is the case in at least
: one of the important deployed mission critical systems in the DoD -- it was
: an Ada 95 program, large parts of which were written by programmers whose
: previous experience was in COBOL.

Perhaps my original post should have said "unreconstructed COBOL programmers"
(whatever that might mean)... I'm sure everyone knows one :-)

: In fact such statements about COBOL are almost always made out of ignorance
: by people who simply do not know COBOL. 

I don't any more -- I gave it up about 20 years ago, and it's changed a bit
since then (as has Fortran/FORTRAN -- they now use years rather than version
numbers, presumably to keep up with Microsoft's latest releases of Life, The
Universe And Everything [TM] or whatever their word processor is called :-)

But hell, pick a language you hate (surely you have one? is IPL-V sufficiently
uncontroversial?) and use that instead...

: (*) COBOL is *not* a woman's name :-)

Damn. Rethink 2nd daughter's name again. Call her Eyepee Ellphive perhaps? :-)

No one would believe that Charlton Heston could be so much fun...

---------------------------------------------------------------
 John English              | mailto:je@brighton.ac.uk
 Senior Lecturer           | http://www.comp.it.bton.ac.uk/je
 Dept. of Computing        | fax: (+44) 1273 642405
 University of Brighton    |
---------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Robert Dewar]

John says

<<But hell, pick a language you hate (surely you have one? is IPL-V sufficiently
uncontroversial?) and use that instead...>>

I can't follow this advice, why on earth waste hate, or for that matter
love, on any programming language?

In practice, nearly every language has some useful and interesting points
to contribute to the world of language design ideas, and if your "hate"
for a language means that you do not appreciate them, then you probably
are missing something!

(in the case of COBOL, I would say the most important ideas are

   scaled decimal arithmetic with specified portable precision, and
	completely portable arithmetic semantics.

   the hierarchical approach to data layout

   lightweight refinement, avoiding the need for heavily nested control
	structures.

   dynamic binding to subroutines at run time, allowing running systems
	to be modified dynamically

   integration of high level features like sorting and indexed IO

This is not necessarily a complete list, just the start of one to give
an idea. If you cannot make a similar list for language X, then it is
probably because you do not know language X well enough!

Remember, one of the weakest, and indeed most damaging, forms of advocacy
for any language is making unfounded criticisms of other languages that
you do not know well enough to criticize!

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> (in the case of COBOL, I would say the most important ideas are
> 
>    scaled decimal arithmetic with specified portable precision, and
>         completely portable arithmetic semantics.

COMPUTATIONAL-n has the semantics of whatever the vendor wants it to
mean, making it highly nonportable. Of course, PICTURE is portable.

>    the hierarchical approach to data layout

I hope that you're not claiming that it originated with COBOL.

>    lightweight refinement, avoiding the need for heavily nested control
>         structures.

In practice PERFORM turns out to be a booby trap; nested IF and DO loops
are far
more readable and less error prone. In fact, if you look at the last few
language 
revisions you will see that the COBOL community has moved away from
out-of-line
PERFORM statements in favor of nested control structures.

> This is not necessarily a complete list, 

Definitely not complete. COBOL has some other features that are nice,
although 
they did not originate in COBOL and the syntax is ghastly.

-- 

                        Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
                        Senior Software SE

The values in from and reply-to are for the benefit of spammers:
reply to domain eds.com, user msustys1.smetz or to domain gsg.eds.com,
user smetz. Do not reply to spamtrap@library.lspace.org

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Marin David Condic, 561.796.8997, M/S 731-96]

Robert Dewar <dewar@MERV.CS.NYU.EDU> writes:
>The idea that mainframes are evaporating is particularly ludicrous. Marin,
>have you noticed that IBM stock has outperformed the stock of all other
>major computer manufacturers in the last two years? Trust me, IBM does
>not make all its money selling PC's!
>
    The stock market is about making money - not making mainframes. So
    I can't really consider the value of IBM stock to be an indication
    of the mainframe market. IBM makes lots of stuff - PCs, servers,
    devices, and, yes, mainframes. I didn't say they were gone - just
    that they certainly aren't out there in anywhere near the
    percentage of market share as they were in, oh - let's say late
    60s to 70s.

>The mainframe market is alive and well, it is true that the rate of
>growth has declined, and no doubt ten years from now the picture will
>change somewhat.
>
    As I said - I'm not saying "gone" just dramatically declined. I
    don't know what's happening in the entire rest of the universe,
    but I work for a very large corporation and in my time here, I've
    watched the engineering & business environment migrate off of IBM
    mainframes to workstations/servers and desktop PCs. Yes we still
    have a few mainframes around and yes they still have their uses
    but they are nowhere near "king of the hill" that they once were.
    They are a "niche market".

>It is not uncommon for people in limited environments to have extraordinarily
>curious ideas of what is going on. I often meet people in academic
>environments who think Unix is a widely used system (an interesting
>statistic here is that OS/2, which everyone knows is a failure, has
>sold more copies than all versions of Unix in all of time).
>
    Oh, I don't know about being in a "limited environment" - As I
    said, I work for one of the larger corporations in the United
    States. This trend *could* be isolated to just United
    Technologies, but when I talk to folks at other large
    corporations, I generally discover the same trend - migration off
    of mainframes and more reliance on workstation/servers, networks
    and PCs. I tend to hear that this migration has been going on
    mostly for the better part of 10 years and that the plan is to be
    rid of the mainframes in the not too distant future. (Of course,
    one can argue that the "server" side of things is really just
    another kind of mainframe - but I think the original intent was to
    talk about those big behemoths that you fed punch cards to and ran
    batch jobs on and connected terminals to and programmed in
    Cobol/JCL or similar. With only a few twists though, that
    workstation/server thing just looks like a more elaborate version
    of the mainframe/terminal - you think? ;-)

>The fact that mainframes have disappeared from your environment cannot be
>extrapolated to the world at large.
>
    I can't imagine myself - or anybody else for that matter -
    presuming to speak for the world at large. I can only speak for
    what I see happening here at UTC. I can attest to the fact that we
    are not the only large corporation that has shoved the mainframes
    into a back closet and mostly forgotten them. There may be large
    corporations out there where the mainframes are going gangbusters
    - I would believe someone's testimony to this effect. But I would
    suspect that if we at UTC found it to be in our financial interest
    and the folks at several other large corporations found it in
    their financial interest, then it's likely to be in the financial
    interest of just about any corporation. I doubt we'll see the
    "classic" mainframe around in another dozen years - it will just
    morph into some new form and the marketing guys will tout it as a
    major advancement in technology.

>P.S. the going rate for a competent experienced COBOL programmer these
>days is between $150K and $200K -- not bad for someone working with
>a dead language on evaporating machines :-)
>
    Well, in fairness, the amount of money being made by a programmer
    is not necessarily a good indicator of the vitality of a given
    industry. (Although for $200k, maybe I should dust off my Cobol
    manual and get a resume out there! Nahhh. I'd probably have to
    leave Palm Beach. ;-)

    I'm sure there's some company out there making buggy whips and
    that they probably pay top dollar for an experienced, highly
    skilled buggy whip craftsman. Or try hiring a stone cutter to
    carve some gargoyles for the roof of your house - that'll likely
    cost a fortune too. :-)

    I think the question I was tossing out was "at what point do you
    want to consider a language 'dead'?" Certainly, there are people
    who still use Cobol, just as there are still people who use
    Pascal, PL/1, Algol, etc, etc, etc. They may even be doing a
    non-trivial level of work or have a non-trivial segment of the
    marketplace. But languages come and they go. There's a non-trivial
    number of people who keep alive Shakespearian English and some of
    them get paid pretty darned well for doing so (Ask Charleton
    Heston to come speak some Shakespear at you and see what the bill
    is likely to be :-) This is not the same as if these folks were to
    be using the language in their everyday lives.

    Maybe the whole characterization of a language being "dead" is a
    mistake anyway. Maybe, as I think I said in my original post, they
    don't really die - but rather fade away. In that sense, the whole
    original question of "Do you think Ada is going to be a dead
    language in 10 years?" is - to use one of your favorite words -
    ludicrous. It will likely still be around in some form in 30
    years. It will likely have some die-hard users and dedicated folks
    adding enhancements/improvements to the language and it's
    compilers. The real question ought to be: "How big a market will
    Ada have in 10 years?" and that's a tough one to call.

    My crystal ball indicates that it will have a pretty good market!
    It already has a substantial installed base of projects & users,
    it's being used more extensively in schools - probably because of
    the availability of GNAT and the fact that you can use it to teach
    the latest programming concepts, and it is recognized in the
    industry as the way to go for large projects with high reliability
    requirements - the type of stuff that tends to hang around for a
    long time. Could it "fade away?" I suppose it's possible, but not
    likely.

    MDC

Marin David Condic, Senior Computer Engineer     ATT:        561.796.8997
Pratt & Whitney GESP, M/S 731-96, P.O.B. 109600  Fax:        561.796.4669
West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600                  Internet:   CONDICMA@PWFL.COM
===============================================================================
    "Languages don't kill people. *Programmers* do!"
        --  Rich Stewart - Language Lawyer & Language Control Opponent.
===============================================================================

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Robert Dewar]

Marin says

    The stock market is about making money - not making mainframes. So
    I can't really consider the value of IBM stock to be an indication
    of the mainframe market. IBM makes lots of stuff - PCs, servers,
    devices, and, yes, mainframes. I didn't say they were gone - just

There is no secret to where IBM's money comes from -- just take the time
to do some research -- in fact all the material is available on the Web!
Take the time sometime, you will clearly find it illuminating.

    Oh, I don't know about being in a "limited environment" - As I
    said, I work for one of the larger corporations in the United
    States. This trend *could* be isolated to just United
    Technologies, but when I talk to folks at other large
    corporations, I generally discover the same trend - migration off
    of mainframes and more reliance on workstation/servers, networks
    and PCs.

Yes, this migration is going on, but as everyone involved in the IS
industry is very much aware, the idea that mainframes can be easily
replaced by client server models has turned out to be an illusion.

It is possible that UTC is indeed atypical. It is certain that your
ideas do not match the larger picture. So, if you are accurate in
your assessment of UTC (often I find that engineers in companies
have zero idea about what is going on in the IS side of the house),
then I would guess that this is the only possible explanation.

    As I said - I'm not saying "gone" just dramatically declined.

No, noone has seen the expected dramatic decline. You have to look
in the second deriviative to see any decline at all. And even there
the figures are surprising. You are making claims that simply cannot
be substantiated except by wishful thinking.

Incidentally, it is the case that the IBM share of the world wide
mainframe market (which is itself growing) is declining, so for a real
picture of the whole mainframe market you need to look at more than
IBM, and in particular, the Japanese mainframe companies have been
doing very well recently.

    I think the question I was tossing out was "at what point do you
    want to consider a language 'dead'?" Certainly, there are people
    who still use Cobol, just as there are still people who use
    Pascal, PL/1, Algol.

The difference between COBOL (Ada people should try to spell languages
correctly :-) and Algol is that it has a much bigger share of the
market. It is the most widely used language in the DoD today, and
is the target of choice for most 4GL's. Many new applications are
being developed every day in COBOL.

Some engineering and technical people imagine that obviously C++
could be used in place of COBOL, but the fact of the matter is
that the COBOL infrastructure (i.e. COBOL + CICS + all sorts of
other stuff provides an environment for IS development that is
not easily matched by any other language). Ada provides some of
the basic features, but still needs a lot building around it to
make it competitive with COBOL for this application area.

The kind of pronouncements that Marin is making are very common
among technical engineers who know very little about the IS market.
One of the problems in this field is that there is a huge barrier
between the IS and non-IS sides of the house at all levels (most
CS professors know nothing at all about IS development, and it is
really a rather shocking gap, given the importance of this area).
Similarly, I often meet engineers who actually think that all the
world uses Unix or NT, and think that COBOL has died out. Just
yesterday, I was talking to someone in the DoD who thought that
DoD was behind commercial industry because it still used COBOL
extensively, and he assumed that the rest of the non-DoD world
had abandoned it.

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Richard Kenner]

In article <dewar.871220626@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
>No, noone has seen the expected dramatic decline. You have to look
>in the second deriviative to see any decline at all. And even there
>the figures are surprising. You are making claims that simply cannot
>be substantiated except by wishful thinking.

You are claiming that the absolute number of mainframes sold per year
is still growing.  Marin is claiming that the percentage of computers
sold each year that are mainframes is dramatically declining.  These
claims are not inconsistent since the total number of computers being
sold is increasing.

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Robert Dewar]

<<You are claiming that the absolute number of mainframes sold per year
is still growing.  Marin is claiming that the percentage of computers
sold each year that are mainframes is dramatically declining.  These
claims are not inconsistent since the total number of computers being
sold is increasing.>>

Well certainly there are lots of palm size organizers sold, if you count
these as computers, they overwhelm unit mainframe sales, and the same is true
for PC's. The same is also true for Starbuck's Coffee.

The issue is not the number of PC's being sold, but the extent to which
these sales are cutting into mainframe sales. Looking at the total number
of PC's sold is no more informative in answering that question than looking
at the sales of Coffee!

If you want to see what is happening to mainframe sales, you look at 
mainframe sales.

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[John English]

Marin David Condic, 561.796.8997, M/S 731-96 (condicma@PWFL.COM) wrote:
:     [...] There's a non-trivial
:     number of people who keep alive Shakespearian English and some of
:     them get paid pretty darned well for doing so (Ask Charleton
:     Heston to come speak some Shakespear at you and see what the bill
:     is likely to be :-)

Charlton Heston doing Shakespeare? Ugh! That's like asking a
Cobol programmer to write Ada, or Neil Diamond to sing Gilbert
and Sullivan... :-)

---------------------------------------------------------------
 John English              | mailto:je@brighton.ac.uk
 Senior Lecturer           | http://www.comp.it.bton.ac.uk/je
 Dept. of Computing        | fax: (+44) 1273 642405
 University of Brighton    |
---------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Marin David Condic, 561.796.8997, M/S 731-96]

Robert Dewar <dewar@MERV.CS.NYU.EDU> writes:
>There are literally thousands of miscellaneous languages that have been
>used a bit, so it is agood thing that many have died off. Let's raise
>the bar a bit and ask for examples of languages that have not survived
>that had at least a national standard, and which were used on a wide
>variety of large projects.
>
    Well, it's probably fair to ask "What constitutes survival?" If
    one programmer at one shop is using the language once a year to
    maintain some legacy system, is that survival? Cobol used to be
    quite widely used and was the standard-issue programming language
    for business data processing. But when mainframes started to
    evaporate, Cobol kind of went with it. Oh sure, there's lots of
    folks still using Cobol, but the usage is nowhere near what it
    once was. Could this be considered a dead language? PL/1, RPG,
    etc. have all had similar heyday's and then dwindled into relative
    obscurity (note I say *relative* here, just in case someone takes
    this as an attack on their pet language.) It's sort of like aging
    movie stars or old soldiers: They never die, just fade away.

    MDC
Marin David Condic, Senior Computer Engineer     ATT:        561.796.8997
Pratt & Whitney GESP, M/S 731-96, P.O.B. 109600  Fax:        561.796.4669
West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600                  Internet:   CONDICMA@PWFL.COM
===============================================================================
    "They can't get you for what you didn't say."
        --  Calvin Coolidge
===============================================================================

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Robert Dewar]

Marin says

<<Well, it's probably fair to ask "What constitutes survival?" If
one programmer at one shop is using the language once a year to
maintain some legacy system, is that survival? Cobol used to be
quite widely used and was the standard-issue programming language
for business data processing. But when mainframes started to
evaporate, Cobol kind of went with it. Oh sure, there's lots of
folks still using Cobol, but the usage is nowhere near what it
once was. Could this be considered a dead language? PL/1, RPG,
>>


The extraordinary thing is that this myth is actually believed by
some experienced managers as well as programmers who simply don't know.

It is of course a completely inaccurate picture. COBOL is still a very
widely used language, and is still the language of choice for developing
new information systems applications. That's not surprising, it has
features that are not duplicated in other mainstream languages such
as C++, Fortran, and Java, that are critical (interestingly Ada 95 is
the one other standardized language that *does* have the necessary
features).

New large COBOL projects are being started every day, and COBOL programmers
are in very heavy demand, made more intense by the re-engineering and
fixing up legacy systems to get through today+860 odd days.

The idea that mainframes are evaporating is particularly ludicrous. Marin,
have you noticed that IBM stock has outperformed the stock of all other
major computer manufacturers in the last two years? Trust me, IBM does
not make all its money selling PC's!

The mainframe market is alive and well, it is true that the rate of
growth has declined, and no doubt ten years from now the picture will
change somewhat.

It is not uncommon for people in limited environments to have extraordinarily
curious ideas of what is going on. I often meet people in academic 
environments who think Unix is a widely used system (an interesting
statistic here is that OS/2, which everyone knows is a failure, has
sold more copies than all versions of Unix in all of time).

The fact that mainframes have disappeared from your environment cannot be
extrapolated to the world at large.

P.S. the going rate for a competent experienced COBOL programmer these
days is between $150K and $200K -- not bad for someone working with
a dead language on evaporating machines :-)

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[HARRY R. ERWIN]

Robert Dewar (dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu) wrote:
: Marin says

: <<Well, it's probably fair to ask "What constitutes survival?" If
: one programmer at one shop is using the language once a year to
: maintain some legacy system, is that survival? Cobol used to be
: quite widely used and was the standard-issue programming language
: for business data processing. But when mainframes started to
: evaporate, Cobol kind of went with it. Oh sure, there's lots of
: folks still using Cobol, but the usage is nowhere near what it
: once was. Could this be considered a dead language? PL/1, RPG,
: >>


: The extraordinary thing is that this myth is actually believed by
: some experienced managers as well as programmers who simply don't know.

Until a week ago, I believed it, too, and then Dewar pointed me in the
right direction.  I trotted over like a good little horse, confirmed he
knew what he was talking about, and started passing the word in my little
corner of the world. 

: ---trimmed---

: It is not uncommon for people in limited environments to have extraordinarily
: curious ideas of what is going on. I often meet people in academic 
: environments who think Unix is a widely used system (an interesting
: statistic here is that OS/2, which everyone knows is a failure, has
: sold more copies than all versions of Unix in all of time).

'POSIX compliance' (read 'sorta like UNIX') is the operating system
version of the Ada mandate.  Interestingly, Windows NT is 'POSIX
compliant' to ensure that it can be bid on Govt contracts that require it,
and (IMHO) is nearly useless when it is used that way. (Is my cynicism
showing?) 

Cheers--
Harry Erwin, Internet: herwin@gmu.edu, 
Web Page: http://osf1.gmu.edu/~herwin 
PhD student in computational neuroscience (how bats echolocate)
Lecturer for CS 211 (data structures and advanced C++)
Senior Software Analyst supporting the FAA

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[rodney]

In article <5sag85$9n2@portal.gmu.edu>,
  herwin@osf1.gmu.edu (HARRY R. ERWIN) wrote:

> 'POSIX compliance' (read 'sorta like UNIX') is the operating system
> version of the Ada mandate.  Interestingly, Windows NT is 'POSIX
> compliant' to ensure that it can be bid on Govt contracts that require it,
> and (IMHO) is nearly useless when it is used that way. (Is my cynicism
> showing?)

:-) yes. Similar to why NASA (for SEWP) and the US Air Force contract
with Hughs Data Systems say that OpenNT must be on the NT boxes for
purchase. OpenNT replaces the MS POSIX subsystem with a Unix for NT. This
means Unix code is really at home on an NT box. It'll likely take the
cynicism away :-)

> Cheers--
> Harry Erwin, Internet: herwin@gmu.edu,
> Web Page: http://osf1.gmu.edu/~herwin
> PhD student in computational neuroscience (how bats echolocate)

                                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ cool.

- Rodney Ruddock

-------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====-----------------------
      http://www.dejanews.com/     Search, Read, Post to Usenet

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Fergus Henderson]

dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

>COBOL is still a very
>widely used language, and is still the language of choice for developing
>new information systems applications. That's not surprising, it has
>features that are not duplicated in other mainstream languages such
>as C++, Fortran, and Java, that are critical (interestingly Ada 95 is
>the one other standardized language that *does* have the necessary
>features).

Which features are the ones that you consider critical for information
systems applications?

--
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>   |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>   |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh@128.250.37.3         |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Robert A Duff]

In article <5skhdb$pfc@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>,
Fergus Henderson <fjh@mundook.cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
>Which features are the ones that you consider critical for information
>systems applications?

I don't know what Robert will say, but my guess is that these kinds of
systems want decimal fixed-point types (with the requirement in
F.3(14-16) to make them useful), plus all the other features in Annex F.

Perhaps also Annex E, for some of them.

- Bob

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Jerry van Dijk]

In article <5skhdb$pfc@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> fjh@mundook.cs.mu.OZ.AU writes:

>dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
>
>>COBOL is still a very
>>widely used language, and is still the language of choice for developing
>>new information systems applications. That's not surprising, it has
>>features that are not duplicated in other mainstream languages such
>>as C++, Fortran, and Java, that are critical (interestingly Ada 95 is
>>the one other standardized language that *does* have the necessary
>>features).

>Which features are the ones that you consider critical for information
>systems applications?

That's easy: decimal types and partitioning.
--

-- Jerry van Dijk | Leiden, Holland
-- Consultant     | Team Ada
-- Ordina Finance | jdijk@acm.org

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[HARRY R. ERWIN]

Paul Van Bellinghen (pvanbell@mhv.net) wrote:

: >     Well, it's probably fair to ask "What constitutes survival?" If

: I think the prime example of a language that just refuses to give up the
: ghost is FORTRAN. Here's a language that had roots at least as far back as
: COBOL ( I really didn't research it - I'm just going by my vague
: recollection).  FORTRAN used to be the language of choice for the
: scientific community and remained so for non-real time applications right
: on through the 70s. I remember maintaining a cross compiler written for a
: microprocessor chip I was using at General Instrument Corp. back in 1980. I
: wrote some flight data analysis programs on a VAX/VMS in the early 80s at
: Loral Corp. Rather than seeing FORTRAN fade away, its proponents keep
: trying to "modernize" it (1977, 1994, etc..).

FORTRAN is still an important language in computational science. There are
a number of reasons why:
1. Highly efficient optimizing compilers
2. Highly reliable compilers
3. Implementations for distributed environments
4. Well-implemented libraries
5. Software reuse, and
6. User community inertia

I use C++ where most of my colleagues use FORTRAN, but that's because most
of my work involves combined discrete event/continuous simulations, and I
find C++ easier to use for those. 

--
Harry Erwin, Internet: herwin@gmu.edu, 
Web Page: http://osf1.gmu.edu/~herwin 
PhD student in computational neuroscience (how bats echolocate)
Lecturer for CS 211 (data structures and advanced C++)
Senior Software Analyst supporting the FAA

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Robert Dewar]

Joerg says

<<   a) native cc versus gcc (language ANSI C): nearly vanishing difference in
         performance.
   b) native f77 versus cc/gcc: a slight gain in performance for Fortran,
         but only vaguely visible and also probably depending on the special
         problem to be solved. (I did so matrix calculations.) Other problem
         domains may show a different result.
   c) Ada95 (and this was an now rather old GNAT version: 3.01!): if runtime
         checks are disabled by a corresponding pragma the pure Ada version
         was a factor 2 slower than the f77/cc/gcc versions. As some dis-
         cussions on c.l.a. mentioned this might be due to my use of uncon-
         strained arrays, generics and such things. Also did I not check
         whether the algorithm was in best shape for Ada95 but instead just
         recoded the C/f77-Version in Fortran.>>


You skipped the only meaningful comparison which is to compare using
a mature high performance Fortran compiler, f77 does not meet this
criterion (yet :-)

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Mark A Biggar]

In article <01bca387$42ffbce0$18a9f5cd@asip120> "Paul Van Bellinghen" <pvanbell@mhv.net> writes:
>I think the prime example of a language that just refuses to give up the
>ghost is FORTRAN. Here's a language that had roots at least as far back as
>COBOL ( I really didn't research it - I'm just going by my vague
>recollection).  FORTRAN used to be the language of choice for the
>scientific community and remained so for non-real time applications right
>on through the 70s. I remember maintaining a cross compiler written for a
>microprocessor chip I was using at General Instrument Corp. back in 1980. I
>wrote some flight data analysis programs on a VAX/VMS in the early 80s at
>Loral Corp. Rather than seeing FORTRAN fade away, its proponents keep
>trying to "modernize" it (1977, 1994, etc..).

Dijkstra once said that he didn't have any idea what language we would
all be programming in in 2020 but that there was a high probability
that it would be called FORTRAN :-)

--
Mark Biggar
mab@wdl.lmco.com

Is Ada likely to survive ?

[safetran]

Hi all 

I am looking for opinions on whether you think the Ada language is going
to be around in the next 5 years ?  How about 10 years ? 

I appreciate that with the over 50 million lines of US DOD Ada code that
exist and the numerous other Ada projects around the world,  Ada will be
around for quite a while (to maintain all this code).   However, I am
looking at it more from the point of view of new projects. 

I work for a **commercial** company in the US and we use Ada for
embedded, real time applications.  I am now about to start a couple of
new projects and need to decide whether I should continue the use of Ada
or move to C/C++/Java.  Things that worry me are: 

(1) Will the compiler vendors be around in the long run.  

(2)Its already difficult to find Ada programmers and many programmers do
not want to work in Ada as it has lower market value. 

(3)My products have a life expectancy of over 10 years and so I need to
find people to maintain the code in the long run. 

Note:  I have been using Ada for over 7 years and so am quite aware of
its benefits and don't need to be convinced [I also program in C/C++ :)] 
--
Rakesh 
Rakesh.Malhotra@Safetran.com

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Stanley Allen]

Rakesh Malhotra wrote:
> 
> I am looking for opinions on whether you think the Ada language is going
> to be around in the next 5 years ?  How about 10 years ?
> 
>  [slice]
> 
> I work for a **commercial** company in the US and we use Ada for
> embedded, real time applications.  I am now about to start a couple of
> new projects and need to decide whether I should continue the use of Ada
> or move to C/C++/Java.  Things that worry me are:
> 
> (1) Will the compiler vendors be around in the long run.
> 
> (2)Its already difficult to find Ada programmers and many programmers do
> not want to work in Ada as it has lower market value.
> 
> (3)My products have a life expectancy of over 10 years and so I need to
> find people to maintain the code in the long run.
> 

Worries #1 and #3 would also be facing you if you choose C++ or Java.

Worry #2 is intersting ... are you accepting resumes?  I think a
lot of Ada programmers would love to build commercial real-time
embedded systems.

--
Stanley Allen
mailto:s_allen@hso.link.com

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[robin]

	safetran <safetran@kaiwan.com> writes:

	>I am looking for opinions on whether you think the Ada language is going
	>to be around in the next 5 years ?  How about 10 years ? 

	>I appreciate that with the over 50 million lines of US DOD Ada code that
	>exist and the numerous other Ada projects around the world,  Ada will be
	>around for quite a while (to maintain all this code).   However, I am
	>looking at it more from the point of view of new projects. 

	>I work for a **commercial** company in the US and we use Ada for
	>embedded, real time applications.  I am now about to start a couple of
	>new projects and need to decide whether I should continue the use of Ada
	>or move to C/C++/Java.  Things that worry me are: 

	>(1) Will the compiler vendors be around in the long run.  

	>(2)Its already difficult to find Ada programmers and many programmers do
	>not want to work in Ada as it has lower market value. 

	>(3)My products have a life expectancy of over 10 years and so I need to
	>find people to maintain the code in the long run. 

	>Note:  I have been using Ada for over 7 years and so am quite aware of
	>its benefits and don't need to be convinced [I also program in C/C++ :)] 
	>--
	>Rakesh 
	>Rakesh.Malhotra@Safetran.com

If you're worried about the long-term availability, and want the
benefits of Ada, why not consider PL/I?

   It provides the capability of Ada, particularly for real-time.

   IBM has recently brought out PL/I for Windows 95 and Windows NT,
and shortly before that, for AIX and OS/2.  AFAIK, it is also
working on porting a version of that compiler for the mainframe.

   That company has had PL/I on its mainframes for the past
30 years or so.

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Adam Beneschan]

 > rav@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (robin) writes:
 >  safetran <safetran@kaiwan.com> writes:
 >
 >  >I am looking for opinions on whether you think the Ada language is going
 >  >to be around in the next 5 years ?  How about 10 years ? 
 >  [snip]
 
 >If you're worried about the long-term availability, and want the
 >benefits of Ada, why not consider PL/I?
 >
 >   It provides the capability of Ada, particularly for real-time.
 >
 >   IBM has recently brought out PL/I for Windows 95 and Windows NT,
 >and shortly before that, for AIX and OS/2.  AFAIK, it is also
 >working on porting a version of that compiler for the mainframe.
 >
 >   That company has had PL/I on its mainframes for the past
 >30 years or so.

IMHO, this answers the original poster's question well.  If PL/I has
survived for 30 years, despite the fact that many of us rarely meet
anyone who actually uses it, then surely Ada will survive at least
that long.

1/2 :-)
                                -- Adam

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Nasser]

In article <5r3v57$3nb$1@krusty.irvine.com>, adam@irvine.com says...

>IMHO, this answers the original poster's question well.  If PL/I has
>survived for 30 years, despite the fact that many of us rarely meet
>anyone who actually uses it, then surely Ada will survive at least
>that long.
>
>1/2 :-)
>                                -- Adam

When I worded at EDS, I used PLI allot, at the time, most of the software
we written for the GM account was in PLI, I thought it was a really neat
and powerfull language, and I liked programming in it, the problem is 
that it does not have modern stuff in it like user defined data types 
for a starter, at least in the DEC subset that we used. 

any way, back to the main topic at hand..

Nasser

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Valerio Bellizzomi]

Ada is the language I want to SUPPORT, because it is very suited for Large
Applications development and maintenance. The Ada reusability mechanisms
(such as packages) are the most powerful I've seen after 10 years of
programming.


robin <rav@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> scritto nell'articolo
<5qp3cf$aqc$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>...
> 	safetran <safetran@kaiwan.com> writes:
> 
> 	>I am looking for opinions on whether you think the Ada language is
going
> 	>to be around in the next 5 years ?  How about 10 years ? 
> 
> 	>I appreciate that with the over 50 million lines of US DOD Ada code
that
> 	>exist and the numerous other Ada projects around the world,  Ada will
be
> 	>around for quite a while (to maintain all this code).   However, I am
> 	>looking at it more from the point of view of new projects. 
> 
> 	>I work for a **commercial** company in the US and we use Ada for
> 	>embedded, real time applications.  I am now about to start a couple of
> 	>new projects and need to decide whether I should continue the use of
Ada
> 	>or move to C/C++/Java.  Things that worry me are: 
> 
> 	>(1) Will the compiler vendors be around in the long run.  
> 
> 	>(2)Its already difficult to find Ada programmers and many programmers
do
> 	>not want to work in Ada as it has lower market value. 
> 
> 	>(3)My products have a life expectancy of over 10 years and so I need to
> 	>find people to maintain the code in the long run. 
> 
> 	>Note:  I have been using Ada for over 7 years and so am quite aware of
> 	>its benefits and don't need to be convinced [I also program in C/C++
:)] 
> 	>--
> 	>Rakesh 
> 	>Rakesh.Malhotra@Safetran.com
> 
> If you're worried about the long-term availability, and want the
> benefits of Ada, why not consider PL/I?
> 
>    It provides the capability of Ada, particularly for real-time.
> 
>    IBM has recently brought out PL/I for Windows 95 and Windows NT,
> and shortly before that, for AIX and OS/2.  AFAIK, it is also
> working on porting a version of that compiler for the mainframe.
> 
>    That company has had PL/I on its mainframes for the past
> 30 years or so.
> 

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[robin]

	"Valerio Bellizzomi" <net@artel.it> writes:

	>Ada is the language I want to SUPPORT, because it is very suited for Large
	>Applications development and maintenance. The Ada reusability mechanisms
	>(such as packages) are the most powerful I've seen after 10 years of
	>programming.

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.

PL/I for OS/2 has tools for building and supporting large
systems built by teams.  It's known as the PL/I Toolkit.

That also was produced by IBM, who are maintaining it.

	>robin <rav@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> scritto nell'articolo
	><5qp3cf$aqc$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>...
	>> 	safetran <safetran@kaiwan.com> writes:
	>> 
	>> 	>I am looking for opinions on whether you think the Ada language is >going
	>> 	>to be around in the next 5 years ?  How about 10 years ? 
	>> 
	>> 	>I appreciate that with the over 50 million lines of US DOD Ada code >that
	>> 	>exist and the numerous other Ada projects around the world,  Ada will >be
	>> 	>around for quite a while (to maintain all this code).   However, I am
	>> 	>looking at it more from the point of view of new projects. 
	>> 
	>> 	>I work for a **commercial** company in the US and we use Ada for
	>> 	>embedded, real time applications.  I am now about to start a couple of
	>> 	>new projects and need to decide whether I should continue the use of >Ada
	>> 	>or move to C/C++/Java.  Things that worry me are: 
	>> 
	>> 	>(1) Will the compiler vendors be around in the long run.  
	>> 
	>> 	>(2)Its already difficult to find Ada programmers and many programmers >do
	>> 	>not want to work in Ada as it has lower market value. 
	>> 
	>> 	>(3)My products have a life expectancy of over 10 years and so I need to
	>> 	>find people to maintain the code in the long run. 
	>> 
	>> 	>Note:  I have been using Ada for over 7 years and so am quite aware of
	>> 	>its benefits and don't need to be convinced [I also program in C/C++ >:)] 
	>> 	>--
	>> 	>Rakesh 
	>> 	>Rakesh.Malhotra@Safetran.com
	>> 
	>> If you're worried about the long-term availability, and want the
	>> benefits of Ada, why not consider PL/I?
	>> 
	>>    It provides the capability of Ada, particularly for real-time.
	>> 
	>>    IBM has recently brought out PL/I for Windows 95 and Windows NT,
	>> and shortly before that, for AIX and OS/2.  AFAIK, it is also
	>> working on porting a version of that compiler for the mainframe.
	>> 
	>>    That company has had PL/I on its mainframes for the past
	>> 30 years or so.

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Robert Dewar]

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.

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Ejon]

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"?

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Robert Dewar]

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


No, Unix cannot be by any stretch of the imagination regarded as an
incarnation (and certainly not a reincarnation) of Unix.

Yes, Unix took some ideas (and the inspiration for its name) from Multics,
and was a reaction to what was seen as the excessive complexity of Multics.

Personally, if I could be using Multics today instead of Unix, I would
be a much happier camper (I mostly use OS/2, but cannot avoid spending
some time each day with unix :-)

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz]

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

No, Unix was written for a small machine that didn't support the memory
model required by MULTICS, and was missing all that made MULTICS
desirable.

-- 

                        Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
                        Senior Software SE

The values in from and reply-to are for the benefit of spammers:
reply to domain eds.com, user msustys1.smetz or to domain gsg.eds.com,
user smetz.

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[robin]

Ejon <ejones7@ibm.net> writes:

	>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.

O.K.  How about: IBM's PL/I compilers for OS/2, AIX, Windows 95 and NT,
which are all written in PL/I.

	>>	   > 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.


Multics was not "pretty much a failure", though it was a bit slow
getting off the ground.

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Robert Dewar]

<<Multics was not "pretty much a failure", though it was a bit slow
getting off the ground.>>

Tell that to the stockholders! Multics most certainly was a failure. And
indeed the aftermath of that failure had a very significant effect, 
particularly at Bell.

Sure, from a technical point of view, Multics was a fine system (note
that the designers of Ada were multics based in the early Ada days,
and the required Ada simulator was written for Multics, as well as
the early Alsys bootstrap processor).

However, it was a commercial failure.

PL/1 is a similar story. Sure it is not dead (I still think that you
are providing very weak examples, there are cases, not many, but some,
of major companies doing commercial software in PL/1). Still, given
the IBM intention that the language would effectively replace COBOL
and Fortran, it must be considered a huge failure (and indeed is
so-regarded by IBM these days -- that does not mean they will abandon
it, no more than they will abandon OS/2, which is also a failure in
terms of the plans, even though it was a technical succcess, and is
still in wide use).

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[robin]

	dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

	><<Multics was not "pretty much a failure", though it was a bit slow
	>getting off the ground.>>

	>Tell that to the stockholders! Multics most certainly was a failure. And
	>indeed the aftermath of that failure had a very significant effect, 
	>particularly at Bell.

	>Sure, from a technical point of view, Multics was a fine system (note
	>that the designers of Ada were multics based in the early Ada days,
	>and the required Ada simulator was written for Multics, as well as
	>the early Alsys bootstrap processor).

	>However, it was a commercial failure.

	>PL/1 is a similar story.

We're informed that IBM makes quite a bundle from PL/I,
and other companies (e.g., Liant and UniPrise) are in
the business of supplying PL/I compilers on varous systems.

	>Sure it is not dead 

You bet it's not!

	>(I still think that you
	>are providing very weak examples,

On the contrary, they are excellent examples, and demonstrate
the adaptabiity, suiltability & portability of PL/I for
large-scale projects.

	>there are cases, not many, but some,
	>of major companies doing commercial software in PL/1). Still, given
	>the IBM intention that the language would effectively replace COBOL
	>and Fortran, it must be considered a huge failure

It's one of the enduring success stories.  The features
in PL/I were so advanced that the language didn't need continual
updating over the years (like some other languages did !).

Recall that PL/I has been going for some 30 years now.

Some of the features that were advanced for the time include
array operations and error interception and handling.

	>(and indeed is
	>so-regarded by IBM these days -- that does not mean they will abandon
	>it, no more than they will abandon OS/2, which is also a failure in
	>terms of the plans, even though it was a technical succcess, and is
	>still in wide use).

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Robert Dewar]

<<Maybe it didn't _need_ it, but PL/I has certainly _received_ quite
a bit of updating.  Compare modern OS/2 PL/I with the 1976 ANSI PL/I
standard.  Even compare it with the MVS PL/I compiler of 1989 (the
last time I saw an MVS PL/I manual) and you'll notice a lot of additions.>>

One would hope so, since the 1976 standard is pretty rusty by modern standards,
which is not surprising for a language inspired by the Fortran, COBOL and
Algol-60 designs of the early-mid sixties. In particular, ANSI PL/1 has
a very limited abstraction capability, no information hiding capability,
and a very primitive approach to concurrency.

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[robin]

ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:

	>rav@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (robin) writes:
	>>It's one of the enduring success stories.  The features
	>>in PL/I were so advanced that the language didn't need continual
	>>updating over the years (like some other languages did !).

	>Maybe it didn't _need_ it, but PL/I has certainly _received_ quite
	>a bit of updating.

Please read what I wrote.  I said that it dodn't need continual updating.

The reason that it didn't need continual updating is that it
had -- pretty well from the beginning (except for list processing,
which was added a short time later) --

@ list processing;
@ dynamic arrays;
@ controlled arrays (i.e. user-controlled allocation)
@ commercial I/O (i.e., formatted I/O)
@ direct file access (i.e., random access);
@ data-directed I/O;
@ macro pre-processor;
@ error-handling;

Many of these were important / significant new features, and were new
to any general-purpose language at the time [e.g. list processing,
controlled storage allocation, direct access files, macro-processor).

It was such forward-thinking features as these that made the language great.

They also helped PL/I from becoming obsolete.

	>  Compare modern OS/2 PL/I with the 1976 ANSI PL/I
	>standard.

The ANSI standard was largely irrelevant IMHO.  Better to compare OS/2 PL/I
with IBM's mainframe compilers and the look-alikes.  Those offerings [OS/2,
Windows 95 & NT, and AIX] are relatively recent.
For the first 25 years, there weren't any major changes to the
language.  New features were added to the Workstation versions,
including an improved macroprocessor, and type facilities, not to
mention a swag of new built-in functions [including some for
Year 2000].

	>  Even compare it with the MVS PL/I compiler of 1989 (the
	>last time I saw an MVS PL/I manual) and you'll notice a lot of additions.

You know I know this.  I loaned you the OS/2 PL/I manual -- recall?

	>Richard A. O'Keefe

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

rav@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (robin) writes:

>ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:

>	>rav@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (robin) writes:
>	>>It's one of the enduring success stories.  The features
>	>>in PL/I were so advanced that the language didn't need continual
>	>>updating over the years (like some other languages did !).

>	>Maybe it didn't _need_ it, but PL/I has certainly _received_ quite
>	>a bit of updating.

>Please read what I wrote.  I said that it dodn't need continual updating.

I WAS NOT ATTACKING PL/I.  I thought that others might misinterpret
your posting as saying that PL/I has not changed.

However, now that you are quibbling over 'continual', few standardised
languages have received 'continual' updating.  Fortran 66, Fortran 77,
Fortran 90:  three standards in thirty years isn't 'continual'.  Ada 83,
Ada 95, that's 12 years between changes, not 'continual'.  C9X will
probably be 10 years after C89, which isn't 'continual' change either.

>Many of these were important / significant new features, and were new
>to any general-purpose language at the time [e.g. list processing,
>controlled storage allocation, direct access files, macro-processor).

What's the relative order of PL/I and Algol W?  Algol W had list processing
and controlled storage allocation.  What's the relative timing of the
PL/I macro processor and the Burroughs Algol preprocessor?  And what's the
relative order of CPL and PL/I?  (The GPM macro processor, ancestor of M4,
was written as part of the CPL project.  Yes it was a separate program.)

>	>  Even compare it with the MVS PL/I compiler of 1989 (the
>	>last time I saw an MVS PL/I manual) and you'll notice a lot of additions.

>You know I know this.  I loaned you the OS/2 PL/I manual -- recall?

Yes, I do.  That's how _I_ know that the language has changed, and how
I know that essentially none of the PL/I code I ever had would work under
OS/2 PL/I.  (Hint:  ANSI PL/I and IBM PL/I use _different_ rules for
interpreting fixed point arithmetic, and I used PL/I on non-IBM machines.)

-- 
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Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[robin]

	ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:

	>Yes, I do.  That's how _I_ know that the language has changed, and how
	>I know that essentially none of the PL/I code I ever had would work under
	>OS/2 PL/I.  (Hint:  ANSI PL/I and IBM PL/I use _different_ rules for
	>interpreting fixed point arithmetic, and I used PL/I on non-IBM machines.)

PL/I for OS/2 will compile according to ANSI rules
or according to IBM rules, according to a compiler
option that you  can specify.  So it's  very likely
your programs would still run under IBM's PL/I for OS/2.

	>Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Brian Rogoff]

On Fri, 18 Jul 1997, safetran wrote:
> Hi all 
> 
> I am looking for opinions on whether you think the Ada language is going
> to be around in the next 5 years ?  How about 10 years ? 

Yes. Yes.

How many languages *haven't* survived? Cobol, Fortran, C, PL/1, and REXX
are still thriving. There is even a company selling Algol 68 compilers.
> 
> I appreciate that with the over 50 million lines of US DOD Ada code that
> exist and the numerous other Ada projects around the world,  Ada will be
> around for quite a while (to maintain all this code).   However, I am
> looking at it more from the point of view of new projects. 

Different question, to which I say yes and yes again. 

> I work for a **commercial** company in the US and we use Ada for
> embedded, real time applications.  I am now about to start a couple of
> new projects and need to decide whether I should continue the use of Ada
> or move to C/C++/Java.  Things that worry me are: 

Unless you are writing code for one of those embedded microprocessors with 
no Ada compiler, why do you want to switch? I assume you are using Ada 95, 
right?

> (1) Will the compiler vendors be around in the long run.  

I believe so, but there is a good free (as in free source) compiler, so 
you'll never be "orphaned". 

> (2)Its already difficult to find Ada programmers and many programmers do
> not want to work in Ada as it has lower market value. 

Its difficult for people who know Ada to find Ada jobs. So I think what 
we have here is a failure to communicate. 
 
> (3)My products have a life expectancy of over 10 years and so I need to
> find people to maintain the code in the long run. 

Ahem. I believe that Ada would be easier to maintain, but that is just my 
opinion. 
 
-- Brian

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz]

Brian Rogoff wrote:
> 
> How many languages *haven't* survived? 

FWIW, plenty: ALGOL 58, COMIT, COMTRAN, FACT, IPL-V, NELLIAC, SIMULA,
TRAC and many more. I don't expect Ada to die in 10 years, but there is
ample precedent.

> -- Brian

-- 

                        Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
                        Senior Software SE

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Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[W. Wesley Groleau x4923]

> > How many languages *haven't* survived?
> FWIW, plenty: ALGOL 58, COMIT, COMTRAN, FACT, IPL-V, NELLIAC, SIMULA,
> TRAC and many more. I don't expect Ada to die in 10 years, but there 
> is ample precedent.

I am aware of a 5 Mega-SLOC Ada project that used SIMULA quite a bit
for modeling and prototyping, 1988-1994

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Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Robert Dewar]

<<> > How many languages *haven't* survived?
> FWIW, plenty: ALGOL 58, COMIT, COMTRAN, FACT, IPL-V, NELLIAC, SIMULA,
> TRAC and many more. I don't expect Ada to die in 10 years, but there
> is ample precedent.
>>


Algol 58 is a bogus entry, since this was never a language that was
standardized and used, it was merely a precursor for Algol-60, a language
that *does* still survive.

COMIT was a very specialized language, very thinly used even at its height
(I was at U of C, so I know about this quite well). If one has to reach
down to this level of obscurity to find examples of languages that have
not survived, then it tends to argue the other side of the case!

SIMULA is still used, this is another bogus entry

IPL-V was another very specialized language, not ever widely used and
certainly not standardized. ...


There are literally thousands of miscellaneous languages that have been
used a bit, so it is agood thing that many have died off. Let's raise
the bar a bit and ask for examples of languages that have not survived
that had at least a national standard, and which were used on a wide
variety of large projects.

My count of the cardinality of this set is zero.

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[dcw]

In article <dewar.870176161@merv>, Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
><<> > How many languages *haven't* survived?
>> FWIW, plenty: ALGOL 58, COMIT, COMTRAN, FACT, IPL-V, NELLIAC, SIMULA,
>> TRAC and many more. I don't expect Ada to die in 10 years, but there
>> is ample precedent.

{...stuff deleted...}

>There are literally thousands of miscellaneous languages that have been
>used a bit, so it is agood thing that many have died off. Let's raise
>the bar a bit and ask for examples of languages that have not survived
>that had at least a national standard, and which were used on a wide
>variety of large projects.
>
>My count of the cardinality of this set is zero.
>

I was fully agreeing with Robert up until the phrase, "...used on a 
wide variety of large projects".  I think that requirement is too
restrictive.  It tilts the balance too far in Ada's favor.  So,
I would stop at languages that had a national standard <or> were
widely used by a broad community.

Using my criteria, I offer the following examples,

UCSD Pascal, Rocky Mountain Basic, PL/M, Forth, RAMISII, DBASIC

Some would assert that UCSD Pascal and Rocky Mountain Basic are 
dialects, not languages.  While I would partially concede the 
point, (they were extensions of a codified standard) there were 
fundamental semantic differences which stretch the definition 
of "dialect".
-- 
David C. (Dave) Willett
Lucent Technologies Greensboro N.C.
(910) 279-7091
dcw@pearl.lucent.com

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Steve Jones - JON]

dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

[snip]
> There are literally thousands of miscellaneous languages that have been
> used a bit, so it is agood thing that many have died off. Let's raise
> the bar a bit and ask for examples of languages that have not survived
> that had at least a national standard, and which were used on a wide
> variety of large projects.

Now while the language "CORAL" is not dead and is still being maintained
I can not imagine it ever being considered for a new project which would
certainly suggest it is on the way to extinction.  The language that
really did for CORAL was Ada.  CORAL IIRC was a British Ministry of Defence
creation for the same reason (but at an earlier time) that the DoD came
up with Ada.


-- 
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|----The above opinions rarely reflect my own and never my employers'------|
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Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[HARRY R. ERWIN]

W. Wesley Groleau x4923 (wwgrol@pseserv3.fw.hac.com) wrote:
: > > How many languages *haven't* survived?
: > FWIW, plenty: ALGOL 58, COMIT, COMTRAN, FACT, IPL-V, NELLIAC, SIMULA,
: > TRAC and many more. I don't expect Ada to die in 10 years, but there 
: > is ample precedent.

From my obsolete or dying list: ALGOL 60, ALGOL 68, PL/I, APL, SNOBOL,
Pascal, CLU, Modula-2, Modula-3, JOVIAL, Prolog, Smalltalk-80.  I'm sure
some people will beg to differ.

: I am aware of a 5 Mega-SLOC Ada project that used SIMULA quite a bit
: for modeling and prototyping, 1988-1994

Simula is wonderful for simulation, in some ways retaining advantages over
C++ and other more modern object-oriented programming languages.
(Smalltalk isn't bad, either.) Neither scale well. Ada 83 lacks support
for a lot of the constructs (e.g., coroutines, abstract data types,
inheritance, and dynamic binding; tools to support event scheduling,
activity scanning, and process interaction models; the integration of
continuous simulation) that serious simulation programming requires. (I've
seen one simulation programming environment ported to Ada 83 as a result
of the mandate. It was hilariously clumsy and completely nonviable.) 

--
Harry Erwin, Internet: herwin@gmu.edu, 
Web Page: http://osf1.gmu.edu/~herwin 
PhD student in computational neuroscience (how bats echolocate)
Lecturer for CS 211 (data structures and advanced C++)
Senior Software Analyst supporting the FAA

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Robert Dewar]

Harry says

<<From my obsolete or dying list: ALGOL 60, ALGOL 68, PL/I, APL, SNOBOL,
Pascal, CLU, Modula-2, Modula-3, JOVIAL, Prolog, Smalltalk-80.  I'm sure
some people will beg to differ.
>>


Well people sure have strange lists.

Algol-60 comes closest to meeting my criteria. It was never standardized,
but Algol-60 Modified was standardized 20 years later (I was involved in
this effort as the chair of WG2.1), but at the time it was standardized,
it was really absurdly late.

Algol-68 was never successful, it was never standardized, it was never
widely used. The nearest that it came to serious use was Algol-68R at
RRE, but despite Ian's best efforts, A68 waws never really a contender,
and there were very few compilers completed. It was a sad case of a
language that was more or less DOA. (I was chair of the A68 mainteance
committee for a number of years, so I know this history well).

PL/I is still widely used, and in fact IBM just released a new
implementation (for the PC I think). Putting this on the list presumably
means nothing more than that you personally think it is obsolete, but
that is not what we are talking about here.

APL is widely used, particularly by accountants, that again is another
blind spot.

SNOBOL (more specifically SPITBOL, which as you probably know I created),
is amazingly alive. I can tell you all sorts of interesting projects that
are using it. One of the most interesting is a project for creating
dictionaries of native American dialects -- a race against time, since
some of these dialects, unlike SNOBOL, are definitely dieing.

Pascal is very much alive, please go to the borland home page to find
out about many interesting projects using Delphi (which is one of
the nicest development environments around). According to Bill Gates,
Delphi has about 5% of the PC development market (Jean Ichbiah, the
original designer of Ada, has used Delphi for his new PC based product).

CLU was never anything other than a research language on my radar screen,
so never really alive in the sense we are talking about. Modula also comes
close to this categorization, well it has been used widely in teaching,
but it has never had a significant commercial penetration as far as I
know, but no doubt there are counter exmaples.

Jovial probably comes closest to having a legitimate place on your list.
It was of course never in wide general use, though it was used on a lot
of military projects, and is consequently still in use today, but over
the long run, I agree it is likely to give way to alternatives.

Prolog is still about as heavily used as it ever was. The only significant
commercial use I am aware of is in connection with AI projects, and in
particular it was the language adopted by the 5th generation project,
and is still widely used in connection with projects stemming from that
MITI effort.

Smalltalk is of course in very wide use, it is seen as a much more
viable contender than C++ by much of the information systems industry
(personally the idea of building giant programs, of millions of lines,
in Smalltalk sounds a bit frightening :-)

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Brian Rogoff]

On 31 Jul 1997, Robert Dewar wrote:
> Algol-68 was never successful, it was never standardized, it was never
> widely used. The nearest that it came to serious use was Algol-68R at
> RRE, but despite Ian's best efforts, A68 waws never really a contender,
> and there were very few compilers completed. It was a sad case of a
> language that was more or less DOA. (I was chair of the A68 mainteance
> committee for a number of years, so I know this history well).

That is sad, it seemed like a nice language on paper. I think that user
definable binary operators are a very good thing, and something I haven't 
seen in too many other languages. The lack of generics and packages would 
be too much though.

> SNOBOL (more specifically SPITBOL, which as you probably know I created),
> is amazingly alive. I can tell you all sorts of interesting projects that
> are using it. One of the most interesting is a project for creating
> dictionaries of native American dialects -- a race against time, since
> some of these dialects, unlike SNOBOL, are definitely dieing.

How close is SPITBOL to Icon? I know a little of the latter, none of the 
former, although I take it they are related. Icon is definitely alive. 

If you'd like to answer this question by releasing the version of GNAT
with the embedded SPITBOL, be my guest ;-).

-- Brian

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz]

Brian Rogoff wrote:
> 
> That is sad, it seemed like a nice language on paper. 

While there were some flaws, ALGOL 68 was a fairly nice language. IMHO
what killed it was a defining document that was unnecessarilly terse.
The use of a W-grammar to define the language was reasonable; the
paucity of elucidation was not.

> I think that user definable binary operators are a very good thing, and 
> something I haven't seen in too many other languages. 
Yes, and there were several other nice features.

> How close is SPITBOL to Icon? 

SPITBOL is basically SNOBOL 4 with a few minor things stripped out; it
is quite different from Icon. I understand that there is a SPITBOL for
the PC from Catspaw.

> I know a little of the latter, none of the
> former, although I take it they are related. 

Not surprisingly, SL5 and Icon were heavily influenced by SNOBOL 4.

> -- Brian

-- 

                        Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
                        Senior Software SE

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Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Robert Dewar]

Seymour said

  While there were some flaws, ALGOL 68 was a fairly nice language. IMHO
  what killed it was a defining document that was unnecessarilly terse.
  The use of a W-grammar to define the language was reasonable; the
  paucity of elucidation was not.

Robert replies

  I don't think unnnecessary terseness was the issue here, but rather
  the sacrifice of informal readability to precision and accuracy. There
  were VERY rarely any arguments about what the defining document said
  or meant, and very very few errors were found (though of course you
  could argue that it was never widely used compared to say Ada).

  But the definining document is no less accessible than say the COBOL
  standard in my view, and had the advantage that implementors at least
  could exactly understand what it said, and easily find anything they
  wanted there. Yes, it required some effort to understand, but that
  is true of any formal definition (by comparison, the Ada standard is
  an informal definition at best).

  The problem is that formal definitions are indeed very much inaccessible
  to those without the skills in reading documents of the type. No amount
  of informal explanation would have helped people to read the Algol-68
  RR if they did not have the necessary mathematical background to be
  comfortable with a highly formal style of presentation.

  For most languages, programmers never see the defining document. How many
  COBOL programmers have read the COBOL standard? Virtually none. How many
  C programmes have read the C standard? Very few. How many C++ programmers
  have read the standard? Trick question -- none, there is no standard yet.

  People typically learn languages from sources other than the defining
  document, and this has been true ever since Algol-60 days (Algol-60
  was the one clear counter-example). Ada-83 came close to Algol-60
  in the extent to which programmers had at least looked at the standard,
  but still most programmers did not learn Ada 83 from the RM.

  What went wrong in retrospect was that informal materials were far too
  slow in coming, and that compilers were slow to appear. If the Algol-68R
  compiler had received wide dissemination on many machines, together with
  Ian Currie's wonderful 80 page "little yellow book", the picture would
  have been different. Indeed in the UK, Algol-68 was widely used, and a
  survey in the early 70's in the British Computer Journal showed the
  overwhelming majority of British Universities naming Algol-68 as the
  ideal teaching language (that same survey shows US universities choosing
  Fortran as the ideal teaching language!)

  Unfortunately the ICL machines were never very successful outside UK
  (where the government forced many universities to choose them).

Seymour said

  SPITBOL is basically SNOBOL 4 with a few minor things stripped out; it
  is quite different from Icon. I understand that there is a SPITBOL for
  the PC from Catspaw.

Robert replies

  Not quite, they are dialects. Spitbol leaves out a couple of the most
  dynamic features of SNOBOL4 that are rarely used (e.g. the ability
  to distinguish between names and values dynamically in pathological
  cases), but also adds many useful features. Spitbol is a compiler 
  that runs typically ten times faster than the Snobol4 interpretors,
  and was one of the early demonstrations that highly dynamic languages
  could be compiled efficiently.

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
>   I don't think unnnecessary terseness was the issue here, but rather
>   the sacrifice of informal readability to precision and accuracy. There
>   were VERY rarely any arguments about what the defining document said
>   or meant, and very very few errors were found (though of course you
>   could argue that it was never widely used compared to say Ada).

The lack of arguments tells nothing about whether the document was too
terse.
It does, of course, tell us that it was unambiguous.
 
>   But the definining document is no less accessible than say the COBOL
>   standard in my view, and had the advantage that implementors at least
>   could exactly understand what it said, and easily find anything they
>   wanted there. 

While I hate, loathe and despise COBOL, the original document from
CODASYL
defined its terms in an easily accessible fashion.

>   Yes, it required some effort to understand, but that
>   is true of any formal definition (by comparison, the Ada standard is
>   an informal definition at best).

No, it is not true of any formal definition; only of definitions that
are not
properly annotated. The "vienna telephone directory" (reports on the
Vienna 
Definition Language and it's use in defining PL/I) are quite formal, but
they 
include enough annotation to guide the reader.
 
>   The problem is that formal definitions are indeed very much inaccessible
>   to those without the skills in reading documents of the type. 

My degree is in Mathematics. Papers in professional jounals are expected
to
be quite technical, but if you submitted a paper ot the AMS or the MAA
with 
just mathematical formulae and no explanatory narrative, the editors
would
bounce it right back to you.

>   No amount
>   of informal explanation would have helped people to read the Algol-68
>   RR if they did not have the necessary mathematical background to be
>   comfortable with a highly formal style of presentation.

True, but irrelevant. No degree of mathematical background will make it
easy
to read text that is deliberately obscure. There is a difference between
formal and turgid, and the ALGOL-68 report was far harder to read than
other
language documents that were every bit as formal.
> 
>   Indeed in the UK, Algol-68 was widely used, 

Indeed, I cited Eurepe in general when I disputed the claim that ALGOL
68 was dead.

> Seymour said
> 
>   SPITBOL is basically SNOBOL 4 with a few minor things stripped out; it
>   is quite different from Icon. I understand that there is a SPITBOL for
>   the PC from Catspaw.
> 
> Robert replies
> 
>   Not quite, they are dialects. Spitbol leaves out a couple of the most
>   dynamic features of SNOBOL4 that are rarely used (e.g. the ability
>   to distinguish between names and values dynamically in pathological
>   cases), 

AS I said, minor things. In my experience, students rarely needed the
missing
features and prefered SPITBOL over SNOBOL 4 due to the improved
performance.

BTW, is the Catspav version still available for the PC?

-- 

                        Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
                        Senior Software SE

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Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

herwin@osf1.gmu.edu (HARRY R. ERWIN) writes:
>From my obsolete or dying list: ALGOL 60, ALGOL 68, PL/I, APL, SNOBOL,
>Pascal, CLU, Modula-2, Modula-3, JOVIAL, Prolog, Smalltalk-80.  I'm sure
>some people will beg to differ.

Your claim that Pascal is "obsolete or dying" will come as a great surprise
to the many _many_ Pascal programmers on PCs.  The live messages in the
comp.lang.pascal.* newsgroups here at the moment number about three thousand,
which is extremely high for an "obsolete or dying" language.  (For comparison,
it's about 10 times as many messages as in comp.lang.ada.)

Prolog is a strange choice too.  There are more Prolog vendors than Ada
vendors.  It's doing rather well for a language that has never had any
government agency, hardware vendor, or software vendor "pushing" it.
The real problem with Prolog is that it's a bit like Lisp:  it's so easy
to implement (which is not the same as being easy to implement _well_) and
so well connected to other areas of computing that it has exploded into
lots of variants.  There is far more creative energy going into developing
the logic programming paradigm than there is going into extending Ada, for
example.

Smalltalk usage is still growing, which makes it another strange choice for
a "dead or dying" language.

Modula-2 and Modula-3.  Has the Modula-2 standard been released yet?
Modula-3 offers useful facilities that are still missing from C++; it may
perhaps be dying, but it will be several years before it can honestly be
called "obsolete".

APL may or may not be dying.  Many of its ideas have shown up in Fortran 90,
and with MATLAB racing away it's clear that the APL _family_ is alive and
well (as for that matter is the Algol family; Ada is a member of that family
after all).  I think it's fair to include the fairly popular S-Plus in the
APL (interactive array-oriented) family too.

It's worth noting that
 - there's at least one commercially significant mainframe that is still
   programmed in a dialect of Algol 60 (it does have a C compiler, but it
   isn't really a C machine)
 - there's an Algol 68 compiler for this machine which I would be using
   if only I had ever figured out how to install it!
 - I have SNOBOL on this machine
 - this major workstaion has a vendor-provided and well supported Pascal
   (they wouldn't do that if they didn't think they'd make money at it!)
 - there are more Prolog systems available for this machine than you could
   possibly hope to make an informed choice from
 - there are several deductive data bases for this machine
 - there's a logic programming language that offers speed as good as C
   and static checking better than Ada
 - there is an excellent commercial Smalltalk for this machine, and
   there's at least one object-oriented data base using a Smalltalk
   dialect as its language (I've got a set of manuals but never used it)
 - IBM are still pushing PL/I for SAA, and their current PL/I is a very
   capable language (although in my view it still has most of the positive
   flaws that distinguished old PL/I)
 - there is a free Simula 67 compiler for this machine, which I have.




-- 
Four policemen playing jazz on an up escalator in the railway station.
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Brian Rogoff]

On 31 Jul 1997, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> The real problem with Prolog is that it's a bit like Lisp:  it's so easy
> to implement (which is not the same as being easy to implement _well_) and
> so well connected to other areas of computing that it has exploded into
> lots of variants.  There is far more creative energy going into developing
> the logic programming paradigm than there is going into extending Ada, for
> example.

The fact that few seem to be working on extending Ada is certainly
unfortunate IMO. Perhaps as we develop more experience with GNAT the 
situation will change. But I think the comparison here isn't completely 
fair. How much creative energy is going into extending the ISO Prolog 
standard, for example, compared to that going into extending Ada? ;-)

But I agree with what you wrote, and when I asked about how many languages 
haven't survived I wasn't claiming none hadn't (I've written interperters 
for languages which never made it off my machine) but that any fairly
widely used language will last "forever" in web years.

-- Brian

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Robert Dewar]

Brian says

<<The fact that few seem to be working on extending Ada is certainly
unfortunate IMO. Perhaps as we develop more experience with GNAT the
situation will change. But I think the comparison here isn't completely
fair. How much creative energy is going into extending the ISO Prolog
standard, for example, compared to that going into extending Ada? ;-)
>>

I strongly disagree. Putting lots of work into extending Ada (at the 
language level) is not the most effective use of time. It is of course
entertaining to do, and one would hope that, particularly in academic
circles, there are those willing to play with language extensions
(hopefully using GNAT to prototyp them).

But in terms of serious use of the language, frequent extension and adding
of features is not very helpful. Far better is to work on the infrastructure,
i.e. bindings, reusable libraries, the knolwedge base of how to use Ada
effectively etc. Occasionally new pragmas and attributes may be useful,
but full fledged language changes and extensions carry a heavy burden of
proof to be worth considering.

Sure there are lots of people playing with ways to extend Prolog (it is
very weak in some areas, and sure needs extension -- I still remember 
the presenter at the fifth generation conference in Tokyo saying that
they were looking at prolog, and it looked very good except in the areas
of modularity and abstraction, but never mind, they would add these features.
TO my taste, these "features" still have not been effectively "added" to
Prolog (actually the idea of modularity and abstraction as add on features
strikes me, and struck me at the time in tokyo, as a big ludicrous.)

I do not however think that this "playing around" with the language is
particularly helpful to the serious use of prolog.

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Brian Rogoff]

On 2 Aug 1997, Robert Dewar wrote:
> Brian says
> 
> <<The fact that few seem to be working on extending Ada is certainly
> unfortunate IMO. Perhaps as we develop more experience with GNAT the
> situation will change. But I think the comparison here isn't completely
> fair. How much creative energy is going into extending the ISO Prolog
> standard, for example, compared to that going into extending Ada? ;-)
> >>
> 
> I strongly disagree. 

I disagree that you disagree, since I agree with the rest of your post.

> Putting lots of work into extending Ada (at the 
> language level) is not the most effective use of time. It is of course
> entertaining to do, and one would hope that, particularly in academic
> circles, there are those willing to play with language extensions
> (hopefully using GNAT to prototyp them).

If you are a programming language researcher, extending an existing
language with new features may very well be an effective use of time. 
I see a lot of work done using C++ as a testbed for new features, and I'd 
prefer that Ada were used instead. Of course, most of us are not language 
researchers or designers, so...

> But in terms of serious use of the language, frequent extension and adding
> of features is not very helpful. Far better is to work on the infrastructure,
> i.e. bindings, reusable libraries, the knolwedge base of how to use Ada
> effectively etc. Occasionally new pragmas and attributes may be useful,
> but full fledged language changes and extensions carry a heavy burden of
> proof to be worth considering.

I strongly agree with this. However, the accumulation of practical
knowledge from the language user community will suggest areas for 
changes, and the best way to test changes and guarantee that
they are really improvements is to write code in the extended language. A
good example is the "withing problem" thread; there seems to be consensus
that the workarounds are not always practical, but no consensus as to the
right solution. Some experience doing some limited "playing" with extended
Ada would provide valuable feedback for the next generation of Ada. I'd 
personally like to have *some* amount of type inference or automatic
instantiation of generics, though I am probably in the minority on this.

> Sure there are lots of people playing with ways to extend Prolog (it is
> very weak in some areas, and sure needs extension -- I still remember 
> the presenter at the fifth generation conference in Tokyo saying that
> they were looking at prolog, and it looked very good except in the areas
> of modularity and abstraction, but never mind, they would add these features.
> TO my taste, these "features" still have not been effectively "added" to
> Prolog (actually the idea of modularity and abstraction as add on features
> strikes me, and struck me at the time in tokyo, as a big ludicrous.)

Actually, some people in the ML community are working on just that idea, 
a "modular module system", which is added on to arbitrary typed base
languages. Of course, this may just confirm your suspicion that the idea
is ludicrous!

-- Brian

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Robert Dewar]

<<If you are a programming language researcher, extending an existing
language with new features may very well be an effective use of time.
I see a lot of work done using C++ as a testbed for new features, and I'd
prefer that Ada were used instead. Of course, most of us are not language
researchers or designers, so...
>>


It is interesting to remember that this was *the* motivation for the
government funding the GNAT work -- to provide such a testbed in Ada.
And there is some interesting work going on ....

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[HARRY R. ERWIN]

Re: criticism of my list of dead or dying languages.

The list was put together to help answer the question of what would be
suitable target languages for converting existing code. One concern was
that the language could reasonably be expected to have significant
multi-vendor support in 10 years. This 10-year rule was how a number of
languages got on the list. For example, although Pascal has a significant
user community today, colleges are shifting their introductory programming
courses away from it to such languages as C++ and Ada (and, in some cases
Java). Mainframe vendors are dropping support to Pascal, mostly due to
lack of use in large projects. Even Borland is moving away from pure
Pascal to Delphi. Modula-2 and Modula-3 got on the list for similar
reasons. etc.

--
Harry Erwin, Internet: herwin@gmu.edu, 
Web Page: http://osf1.gmu.edu/~herwin 
PhD student in computational neuroscience (how bats echolocate)
Lecturer for CS 211 (data structures and advanced C++)
Senior Software Analyst supporting the FAA

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[William Clodius]

Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> <snip>  There is far more creative energy going into developing
> the logic programming paradigm than there is going into extending Ada, for
> example.
> <snip>

This strikes me as a misleading analogy. You are comparing a paradigm
(logic programming) with a subset (?) (Ada) of the paradigm "imperative"
programming (imperative is probably the wrong term here). More relevant
comparisons would be paradigm vs. paradigm, i.e., logic programming
(including Prolog, Goedel, Mercury, etc.) vs. "imperative" programming
(Pascal, Ada, Fortran, C, C++, etc.), or dialects of Prolog vs. dialects
of Ada. I would be surprised if the paradigm vs. paradigm comparison
does not reveal more effort going into the imperative programming
paradigm. I suspect that Prolog wins over Ada on the subset vs. subset
comparison, because most examples of the logic programming paradigm
would be considered to be dialects of Prolog, and most examples of the
imperative programming paradigm would not be considered to be dialects
of Ada.

-- 

William B. Clodius		Phone: (505)-665-9370
Los Alamos Nat. Lab., NIS-2     FAX: (505)-667-3815
PO Box 1663, MS-C323    	Group office: (505)-667-5776
Los Alamos, NM 87545            Email: wclodius@lanl.gov

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Brian Rogoff]

On 5 Aug 1997, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> William Clodius <wclodius@lanl.gov> writes:
> >Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> >> <snip>  There is far more creative energy going into developing
> >> the logic programming paradigm than there is going into extending Ada, for
> >> example.
> >> <snip>
> 
> >This strikes me as a misleading analogy.
> <snip>
> The ruddy thing is a flipping CONTRAST.
> Let's face it, before Prolog there _was_ no "logic programming paradigm".

Irrelevant, and arguably false. Even if one accepts that that paradigm
began with Prolog that doesn't mean one should have to identify Prolog with
the logic programming paradigm. 

> The major misreading, however, was in thinking that I intended
> "developing the paradigm" to be understood as an unmixed good.

I certainly understood. My own point was that some development of Ada 
could be a good thing, and I currently see very little.  

> I don't *want* people "developing the Ada paradigm" (and there
> _is_ an Ada paradigm distinct from the "imperative" paradigm in
 
I disagree with this. If there is an "Ada paradigm", distinct from 
CLU, Modula-X, Oberon, Theta, etc., then it becomes *meaningless* to 
talk about "paradigms" distinct from programming languages. Perhaps 
if you said what you believe the "Ada paradigm" is, I would change 
my mind. 

> general) in a hundred different directions.  All this development
> of the paradigm is great for filling the shelves with PhDs, but
> lousy for people who actually want to *use* the wretched thing.

Some development is great for users. Anna and Larch like tools, for 
example, which require no changes to the base language, would be quite  
useful. I believe that you are interpeting "extensions" as being 
"incompatible language changes" which is not entirely what I had in 
mind. 

-- Brian

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

Brian Rogoff <bpr@shellx.best.com> writes:

>On 5 Aug 1997, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
>> Let's face it, before Prolog there _was_ no "logic programming paradigm".

>Irrelevant,

Well, *I* think it's relevant, or I wouldn't have written it.

>and arguably false.

So *argue* it.  You _could_ talk about AbSys/AbSet, but it was only
_retrospectively_ that they were described as logic programming languages.

>Even if one accepts that that paradigm
>began with Prolog that doesn't mean one should have to identify Prolog with
>the logic programming paradigm. 

Attacking a proposition no-one advanced is not a good way to argue.
It remains true that for practical purposes, the "logic programming
paradigm" began with (Marseilles) Prolog, and to the extent that
interest has left Prolog, it is to the extent and for the reason that
there are now _better_ logic programming languages there.

>> I don't *want* people "developing the Ada paradigm" (and there
>> _is_ an Ada paradigm distinct from the "imperative" paradigm in
> 
>I disagree with this. If there is an "Ada paradigm", distinct from 
>CLU, Modula-X, Oberon, Theta, etc., then it becomes *meaningless* to 
>talk about "paradigms" distinct from programming languages. Perhaps 
>if you said what you believe the "Ada paradigm" is, I would change 
>my mind. 

A paradigm is simply a mindset, and is sometimes set forth in a rationale.
I know nothing about Theta, or Modula-X (I do know Modula, Modula-2, and
Modula-3, and have reference material for the latter two handy).  I have
read most of the Oberon-related PhD theses and have the "Project Oberon"
book in front of me right now (three hand-spans away, about a hand-span
up and to the right).  The Oberon paradigm is "multum in parvo", "don't
put it in unless you can't do without".  It's an imperative language,
but the mindset is *importantly* different from the Pascal mindset.
There is, for example, an Oberon *system*, and the language wasn't really
designed to be separate from the system.  Fundamentally, I think the
Oberon paradigm is something like "if you can't describe the whole thing
to someone, redesign and simplify it until you can".  The Ada paradigm is
"make it possible to build things no one human being can ever master, and
add whatever you have to (carefully) so that they _can_ delimit and master
the bits they need."  Ada and Oberon have almost opposite approaches to
interfaces, for example.  The Oberon approach minimises the amount of
redundancy.  This makes an already small system smaller.  The Ada approach
uses redundancy in a controlled way, with the aim of limiting the amount
of the system you need to read.

I'm not talking about micro-level paradigms (are there boxes you can alter
the contents of, is the basic language extension a command, a function, or
a relation) but a level further up, about what kind of components you want
to make a software system out of and how you connect them.  Where are the
child packages in Oberon?  Where are the generics?  On the other hand,
where is the dynamic loading of modules in Ada?

>> general) in a hundred different directions.  All this development
>> of the paradigm is great for filling the shelves with PhDs, but
>> lousy for people who actually want to *use* the wretched thing.

>Some development is great for users. Anna and Larch like tools, for 
>example, which require no changes to the base language, would be quite  
>useful. I believe that you are interpeting "extensions" as being 
>"incompatible language changes" which is not entirely what I had in 
>mind. 

I regard Anna and Larch as *tools* not *extensions*, but we are in
vehement agreement that they would be lovely things to have.

-- 
Four policemen playing jazz on an up escalator in the railway station.
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Brian Rogoff]

On 11 Aug 1997, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

> Brian Rogoff <bpr@shellx.best.com> writes:
> 
> >On 5 Aug 1997, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> >> Let's face it, before Prolog there _was_ no "logic programming paradigm".
> 
> >Irrelevant,
> 
> Well, *I* think it's relevant, or I wouldn't have written it.

It is irrelevant to the point made by William Clodius (that I also made)
that a comparison between the "logic programming paradigm" and "the Ada
programming language" is apples and oranges.

> >and arguably false.
>
> So *argue* it.  You _could_ talk about AbSys/AbSet, but it was only
> _retrospectively_ that they were described as logic programming
> languages.

It probably isn't quite appropriate to argue this here in c.l.a., but I
believe that there were theorem provers based on resolution in the late
'60s (PLANNER, and other stuff by Hewitt and co at MIT ). And the
unification algorithm itself is also from the sixties. 

Also, the fact that something is only retrospectively described as a logic 
programming language is again irrelevant; "Structured Programming" has a 
whole section on Simula, and doesn't say it is "object oriented".  
> 
> >Even if one accepts that that paradigm
> >began with Prolog that doesn't mean one should have to identify Prolog with
> >the logic programming paradigm. 
> 
> Attacking a proposition no-one advanced is not a good way to argue.

Sorry, I thought you were implying this pretty strongly from your previous
statements. There was no deliberate attempt at misrepresentation. 

> >> I don't *want* people "developing the Ada paradigm" (and there
> >> _is_ an Ada paradigm distinct from the "imperative" paradigm in
> > 
> >I disagree with this. If there is an "Ada paradigm", distinct from 
> >CLU, Modula-X, Oberon, Theta, etc., then it becomes *meaningless* to 
> >talk about "paradigms" distinct from programming languages. Perhaps 
> >if you said what you believe the "Ada paradigm" is, I would change 
> >my mind. 
> 
> A paradigm is simply a mindset, and is sometimes set forth in a rationale.
> I know nothing about Theta, or Modula-X (I do know Modula, Modula-2, and
> Modula-3, and have reference material for the latter two handy).  I have

"Modula X" is a shorthand for all the Modulas (we Americans are a lazy
lot), Theta is the successor to CLU (no URL handy). 

As I suspected, we disagree on definitions. I don't have a good definition 
for "paradigm", but it doesn't seem to match yours. Languages can be said 
to support some paradigm, but inclusion in a paradigm is like fuzzy set
membership (are Scheme and ML "functional", is Ada "object oriented", etc.)
The languages I mentioned are ones that I would say are similar to Ada, 
statically typed, imperative, modular languages. 

> >Some development is great for users. Anna and Larch like tools, for 
> >example, which require no changes to the base language, would be quite  
> >useful. I believe that you are interpeting "extensions" as being 
> >"incompatible language changes" which is not entirely what I had in 
> >mind. 
> 
> I regard Anna and Larch as *tools* not *extensions*, but we are in
> vehement agreement that they would be lovely things to have.

OK, I can see that (extension vs tool), although with Anna and its
descendants I suspect that we're getting closer to an upwardly compatible
extension. I would be thrilled if someone was working on updating these
for Ada 95, even if they were calling them tools not extensions :-).

-- Brian

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[William Clodius]

Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> <snip> Has the Modula-2 standard been released yet?
> <snip>

According to the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG13  page,

http://sc22wg13.twi.tudelft.nl/

ISO/IEC 10514-1 (Modula-2, Base Language) 

has been published per 1996-06-01. You might also find the FAQ to be of
interest.

ftp://ftp.twu.ca/pub/modula2/m2faq.html

Mind you, given its controversy (the US, Netherlands, and Japan opposed
the standard), size (reportedly over 700 pages), reputed complexity, and
relative lack of popularity, the language standard may not prove to be
useful. As the US voted against the standard I suspect that it is not
available through ANSI (of interest to US readers though not probably of
interest to an Australian), though you should be able to get a copy
through the ISO.

-- 

William B. Clodius		Phone: (505)-665-9370
Los Alamos Nat. Lab., NIS-2     FAX: (505)-667-3815
PO Box 1663, MS-C323    	Group office: (505)-667-5776
Los Alamos, NM 87545            Email: wclodius@lanl.gov

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Robert Dewar]

Rakesh says

<<I appreciate that with the over 50 million lines of US DOD Ada code that
exist and the numerous other Ada projects around the world,  Ada will be
around for quite a while (to maintain all this code).   However, I am
looking at it more from the point of view of new projects.

I work for a **commercial** company in the US and we use Ada for
embedded, real time applications.  I am now about to start a couple of
new projects and need to decide whether I should continue the use of Ada
or move to C/C++/Java.  Things that worry me are:

(1) Will the compiler vendors be around in the long run.

(2)Its already difficult to find Ada programmers and many programmers do
not want to work in Ada as it has lower market value.

(3)My products have a life expectancy of over 10 years and so I need to
find people to maintain the code in the long run.
>>


Many of our big customers starting new projects today, or in the near
future are certainly expecting Ada to be around for a long time, and
in particular are expecting GNAT support to be available for a long
time (they look ahead at *least* ten years), and I cannot speak for
the other vendors, but we are an all-Ada company that is not hesitant
to put Ada into our company name, and we expect to be around for a long time!

I am a little puzzled by (2), hard to find = high market value. But perhaps
what you should be looking for anyway is *good* programmers. Good programmers
should be easily able to adjust to Ada, and quickly get to the point of being
able to take advantage of it. An interesting illustration of this was the
Airfields project, the first fielded system in Ada 95, which was largely
written by people with no experience in Ada (I believe some of them were
in fact COBOL programmers). Despite the fact they were new to the language
and were using a quite preliminary version of GNAT, this project was a great
success.

As to (3), whether your code is maintainable or not depends on whether it
is maintainable code. As you note, you know the advantages of Ada, and one
of the big advantages is precisely that both the language and the culture
of programmers using the language encourage the production of maintainable 
code. An unmaintainable program in a familiar language is not easier to
maintain than a maintainable program in almost any language.

I don't think you need to worry about having Ada programmers around to
maintain your code in ten years. If you are trying to look ahead ten
years to see what will be the popular language-du-jour in the year 2007,
I think that is an idle excercise. I doubt it will be any of Java, C++
or Ada, but that really does not matter. There will certainly be 
competent programmers around ten years from now who can maintain well
written Ada code.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Paul Van Bellinghen]

> I am a little puzzled by (2), hard to find = high market value. But
perhaps
> what you should be looking for anyway is *good* programmers. Good
programmers
> should be easily able to adjust to Ada, and quickly get to the point of
being
> able to take advantage of it. An interesting illustration of this was the
> Airfields project, the first fielded system in Ada 95, which was largely
> written by people with no experience in Ada (I believe some of them were
> in fact COBOL programmers). Despite the fact they were new to the
language
> and were using a quite preliminary version of GNAT, this project was a
great
> success.
>

I think the man is sold on Ada and does not have a problem training "good"
programmers in using Ada for the company's RT embedded apps. However, I
think he is concerned about drawing the best talent to his company when he
needs to staff up. I know we have been having trouble in this area (we use
Ada exclusively for our RTE apps - a step up from assembly language which
we were doing up until a few years ago). Many of the candidates we
interview are concerned about the future of the Ada language. Even the DOD
may be moving away from it (there are advocates for both C++ and Ada in the
DOD). 

I was interviewing for a possible change in companies earlier this year and
I can tell you that these companies are VERY concerned about the languages
you are familiar with. Even though I have had only limited experience in
using C for RTE apps, I insured these companies that a seasoned software
engineer can become proficient in any language since it is just a tool - a
means to an end ( I have been doing this stuff for 22 years - one of those
early EEs that switched to SW) . What matters, I told them, is having
experience in applying good programming techniques to RTE designs. Of
course, it fell on deaf ears.  
 
> As to (3), whether your code is maintainable or not depends on whether it
> is maintainable code. As you note, you know the advantages of Ada, and
one
> of the big advantages is precisely that both the language and the culture
> of programmers using the language encourage the production of
maintainable 
> code. An unmaintainable program in a familiar language is not easier to
> maintain than a maintainable program in almost any language.

Here, I think he is concerned that his programmers, if trained in another
language, can learn Ada in order to maintain these programs.  I don't think
he will have a problem in this area. 

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> Rakesh says
> 
> <<I appreciate that with the over 50 million lines of US DOD Ada code that
> exist and the numerous other Ada projects around the world,  Ada will be
> around for quite a while (to maintain all this code).   However, I am
> looking at it more from the point of view of new projects.

...

> I don't think you need to worry about having Ada programmers around to
> maintain your code in ten years. If you are trying to look ahead ten
> years to see what will be the popular language-du-jour in the year 2007,
> I think that is an idle excercise. 

I concurr; he doesn't have a SNOBOL's chance <g> of predicting what
language
 will be top dog in ten years, so he's better off trying to decide what 
language will let him do the best job now.

> Robert Dewar

-- 

                        Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
                        Senior Software SE

The values in from and reply-to are for the benefit of spammers:
reply to domain eds.com, user msustys1.smetz or to domain gsg.eds.com,
user smetz.

Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Odo Wolbers]

s> I work for a **commercial** company in the US and we use Ada for
s> embedded, real time applications.  I am now about to start a couple of
s> new projects and need to decide whether I should continue the use of Ada
s> or move to CC++Java.  Things that worry me are: 
s> 
s> (1) Will the compiler vendors be around in the long run.  
s> 
s> (2)Its already difficult to find Ada programmers and many programmers do
s> not want to work in Ada as it has lower market value. 
s> 
s> (3)My products have a life expectancy of over 10 years and so I need to
s> find people to maintain the code in the long run. 

if somebody really knews how to program he will be able to learn another
language in one or two weeks - to get used to the libraries will take the most
time, depends on how big they are.

There may be differences between programmes of procedural languages (FORTRAN,
C, etc) and AI-oriented lagnuages (LISP, PROLOG).

So don't worry about languages - your problem is, that in the future you will
only find GUI-programmer (for ACCES, WINDOS, EXCEL etc.) than real programmer.

Ciao
Odo

P.S. I've learned programming in 6802-assembler in the late 70th and since then
about 13 other languages (from different Assemblers like IBM 370 to FORTH or
Ada).

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[safetran]

My ISP does not seem to be getting all the messages from the news server
at sw-eng.falls-church so I can't reply to each of your messages
individually - I can only post my reply to my news server.  I've got a
complaint in with the ISP and hope he will fix it soon.   Sorry about
that.  Also as a result of that this email is pretty long.

>Stanley Allen writes:
>Worries #1 and #3 would also be facing you if you choose C++ or Java.

I would not be worried about C++ that much. Considering the volume of
C++ code produced and the number of programmers of C++  its going to be
around for quite a while.  C came out in the early seventies and its
still around.   Java - I agree.  Its new and one does not know how long
it will be around for.  I also do not know how well Java will turn out
in the hard real time world.  I know that a lot of work is going on in
trying to make it deterministic and there are a couple of vendors who
have succeeded (somewhat).

>Worry #2 is intersting ... are you accepting resumes?  I think a
>lot of Ada program

Yes we are hiring - have about 4 slots open.  Though you may not find
the work very interesting :).   One important bit of info I left out was
that we do **safety critical** systems.  As a lot of you know this can
be a rigorous environment to work in.

Robert Dewar writes:
>I am a little puzzled by (2), hard to find = high market value. But perhaps
>what you should be looking for anyway is *good* programmers. 

What I meant was that (sometimes) people do not want to program in Ada. 
The languages in vogue today are C/C++/Java.  And everyone wants these
to be on their resume.  So sometimes programmers/engineers do not want
to work in Ada as it has "lower market value" -- whatever that means !!

>As to (3), whether your code is maintainable or not depends on whether it
>is maintainable code.

I was not very clear here : yes Ada is very maintainable but if (in 10
years) you can't find programmers who know the language then it does not
really matter how maintainable the language is.   Like a lot of you have
said a good programmer can pick up any language -  I agree with that.  
Its just that if you hire someone and he has to learn a new language -
well that is additional cost vs hiring someone who already knows it.

>If you are trying to look ahead ten
>years to see what will be the popular language-du-jour in the year 2007,
>I think that is an idle excercise. I doubt it will be any of Java, C++
>or Ada, but that really does not matter.

Don't know about that.  C has survived a long time.  If someone was to
ask me to bet the odds of Ada vs C++ I would go for C++.    Again I am
not saying that C++ is better; like I mentioned in my original post I
have used Ada for over 7 years and also use C/C++.

Paul Van Bellinghan writes:
>I think the man is sold on Ada and does not have a problem training "good"
>programmers in using Ada for the company's RT embedded apps. 

Correct.

>Many of the candidates we
>interview are concerned about the future of the Ada language. Even the DOD
>may be moving away from it (there are advocates for both C++ and Ada in the
>DOD). 

Amen.

>What matters, I told them, is having
>experience in applying good programming techniques to RTE designs. Of
>course, it fell on deaf ears.

You are right about this.  I also find that those people who have worked
with Ada generally make better programmers - their code is more
readable.  I have a few colleagues who used to work with Ada but now
work with C/C++ and their code is infinitely more readable that just
straight C programmers.  This is not to say that there aren't good C/C++
programmers out there.

Brian Rogoff writes:
>How many languages *haven't* survived? Cobol, Fortran, C, PL/1, and REXX
>are still thriving. There is even a company selling Algol 68 compilers.

My question was not survival as just survival - but more will Ada become
a bit more mainstream or at least stay as "mainstream" as it is today. 
I agree with you that all these languages have survived but how
mainstream are they  compared to (say) C/C++.

>Unless you are writing code for one of those embedded microprocessors with 
>no Ada compiler, why do you want to switch? I assume you are using Ada 95, 
>right?

I think I have explained why I am thinking of switching.  We were using
Ada 83.  But on the new projects we would try to use Ada 95.

>I believe so, but there is a good free (as in free source) compiler, so 
>you'll never be "orphaned". 

We work in the embedded world and the "Free" compiler is a host
compiler. While GNAT can be ported to be cross we also use emulators and
need a debugger to work with this etc etc..  So GNAT by itself is only
part of the answer.

Jeff Carter writes:

>Ada is the language of choice for very large systems and for
>safety-critical systems.

Yes you are correct.  However a lot of safety critical systems are being
done in C/C++.  A lot of medical electronics company's,  the car
industry,  rail-road industry etc etc do their safety critical systems
in C - I know these to be correct as I have spoken with people from
these industries and work in one of them myself.  Also, even when Ada
was mandated,  I understand that DOD contractors would get waivers and
do their systems in C.  Don't know to what extent this is true but I
have friends who work in DOD related companies and this is what I heard
from them.    So atleast some military and aerospace related software is
in C.    There is a book on writing safety critical software in C and in
the book the author acknowledges interviews he has done with
DOD/aerospace firms and they were using C.

Please do not mis-understand - I am not endorsing any of the above or
saying it is good practice. Just that this is how things are. 

--
Rakesh
Rakesh.Malhotra@Safetran.com

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Jon S Anthony]

In article <33D416AA.4622C3C8@kaiwan.com> safetran <safetran@kaiwan.com> writes:

> >Stanley Allen writes:
> >Worries #1 and #3 would also be facing you if you choose C++ or Java.
> 
> I would not be worried about C++ that much. Considering the volume of
> C++ code produced and the number of programmers of C++  its going to be
> around for quite a while.

I think he was referring to compiler _companies_.  You have no
guarantee that these companies will not fold and take their compilers
with them.


> >As to (3), whether your code is maintainable or not depends on whether it
> >is maintainable code.
> 
> I was not very clear here : yes Ada is very maintainable but if (in 10
> years) you can't find programmers who know the language then it does not
> really matter how maintainable the language is.

This is not going to be a problem.  IMO, the situation is going to get
better.


> Its just that if you hire someone and he has to learn a new language -
> well that is additional cost vs hiring someone who already knows it.

Yes, it is easy to hire a C/C++/Java 1 day wonder.  And cheaply too.
Someone who was flipping burgers a week before, got C/C++/Java for
dummies or C/C++/Java in 5 days and is, voila', now a programmer who
"knows" it.


> Brian Rogoff writes:
> >How many languages *haven't* survived? Cobol, Fortran, C, PL/1, and REXX
> >are still thriving. There is even a company selling Algol 68 compilers.
> 
> My question was not survival as just survival - but more will Ada become
> a bit more mainstream or at least stay as "mainstream" as it is today. 
> I agree with you that all these languages have survived but how
> mainstream are they  compared to (say) C/C++.

How mainstream is C/C++ compared to (say) VB??  Or Excel macro
language??  Not very.  Yes this is a fatuous comparison - just like
yours.


> Yes you are correct.  However a lot of safety critical systems are
> being done in C/C++.

And it wouldn't surprise me that "a lot" are being done in VB.  I know
for a fact that some are done in Excel.


>  A lot of medical electronics company's, the car industry, rail-road
> industry etc etc do their safety critical systems in C

Actually, the car industry still uses a lot of assembly.  GM used/uses
an offshoot of M2.  It wouldn't surprise me, but I don't know of C
actually being used in by the auto makers in this sort of area.


> Please do not mis-understand - I am not endorsing any of the above or
> saying it is good practice. Just that this is how things are. 

Here's my take: If you want to use Ada - use it.  Don't worry about
whether it's going "to be around" or something.  That's not an issue.
If you don't want to use it, don't.

/Jon

-- 
Jon Anthony
OMI, Belmont, MA 02178
617.484.3383
"Nightmares - Ha!  The way my life's been going lately,
 Who'd notice?"  -- Londo Mollari

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Nasser]

In article <JSA.97Jul22150552@alexandria.organon.com>, 

>> Its just that if you hire someone and he has to learn a new language -
>> well that is additional cost vs hiring someone who already knows it.
>
>Yes, it is easy to hire a C/C++/Java 1 day wonder.  And cheaply too.
>Someone who was flipping burgers a week before, got C/C++/Java for
>dummies or C/C++/Java in 5 days and is, voila', now a programmer who
>"knows" it.
>

I am not sure about the "cheap" part. Java programmers with less than one
year exp. can ask for $80-$100/hr, and many get close to that. It is the latest
fashion as you know, even though many might have no clue about design and
software engineering, but no one cares, since the ones hiring most
likely also have no clue.

As far as the pay rate for C++ vs. Ada, I notice that C/C++ programmers
make more than Ada programmers. you see, goverment and defense companies
salaries (which is where Ada is used in the US at least) are lower 
than private/commerical compnaies. 

>
>Here's my take: If you want to use Ada - use it.  Don't worry about
>whether it's going "to be around" or something.  That's not an issue.
>If you don't want to use it, don't.
>

Agree. good advice. one should not always follow the crowd, if we all
did, then we'll probably be still cooking our food over a fire under
open sky in some forest somewhere. (humm.. come to think of it, that does 
not sound that bad :)

Nasser

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Jon S Anthony]

In article <5r445r$8au@drn.zippo.com> Nasser writes:

> >Yes, it is easy to hire a C/C++/Java 1 day wonder.  And cheaply too.
> >Someone who was flipping burgers a week before, got C/C++/Java for
> >dummies or C/C++/Java in 5 days and is, voila', now a programmer who
> >"knows" it.
> >
> 
> I am not sure about the "cheap" part. Java programmers with less
> than one year exp. can ask for $80-$100/hr, and many get close to
> that. It is the latest fashion as you know, even though many might
> have no clue about design and software engineering, but no one
> cares, since the ones hiring most likely also have no clue.

If you are talking about a contractor, those rates sound plausible.
But then, such people had better be pretty darn capable and quite
experienced.  Someone heavily steeped in Java from the start of 1.0.2
could probably get something like that as a contractor.  Then again,
these rates are pretty typical of a highly qualified C programmer as
well.

If you are talking about the 1 day wonders, there is no way that they
will be making those rates - at least not for more than couple of
weeks or so, after which they will be found out and dumped.


> As far as the pay rate for C++ vs. Ada, I notice that C/C++
> programmers make more than Ada programmers. you see, goverment and
> defense companies salaries (which is where Ada is used in the US at
> least) are lower than private/commerical compnaies.

Possible.  But that's not what I've seen.  This is more a case of
supply and demand (as Robert has pointed out).  Since there are hordes
of C hackers out there, if you just need a "programmer", you can get
one cheap.  Someone who is a true C++ "guru" can demand a _lot_ and
get it as a) such people are nearly non-existent and b) you need such
a person to make anything beyond a "hello world" level C++ project
fly.


> >Here's my take: If you want to use Ada - use it.  Don't worry about
> >whether it's going "to be around" or something.  That's not an issue.
> >If you don't want to use it, don't.
> >
> 
> Agree. good advice. one should not always follow the crowd, if we all
> did, then we'll probably be still cooking our food over a fire under
> open sky in some forest somewhere. (humm.. come to think of it, that does 
> not sound that bad :)

;-), How's that saying go, "We shoulda stopped at fire"....


/Jon
-- 
Jon Anthony
OMI, Belmont, MA 02178
617.484.3383
"Nightmares - Ha!  The way my life's been going lately,
 Who'd notice?"  -- Londo Mollari

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[jorgie]

Nasser wrote:
> 
> In article <JSA.97Jul22150552@alexandria.organon.com>,
> 
> >> Its just that if you hire someone and he has to learn a new language -
> >> well that is additional cost vs hiring someone who already knows it.
> >
> >Yes, it is easy to hire a C/C++/Java 1 day wonder.  And cheaply too.
> >Someone who was flipping burgers a week before, got C/C++/Java for
> >dummies or C/C++/Java in 5 days and is, voila', now a programmer who
> >"knows" it.
> >
> 
> I am not sure about the "cheap" part. Java programmers with less than one
> year exp. can ask for $80-$100/hr, and many get close to that. It is the latest
> fashion as you know, even though many might have no clue about design and
> software engineering, but no one cares, since the ones hiring most
> likely also have no clue.
> 
> As far as the pay rate for C++ vs. Ada, I notice that C/C++ programmers
> make more than Ada programmers. you see, goverment and defense companies
> salaries (which is where Ada is used in the US at least) are lower
> than private/commerical compnaies.
> 
> >
> >Here's my take: If you want to use Ada - use it.  Don't worry about
> >whether it's going "to be around" or something.  That's not an issue.
> >If you don't want to use it, don't.
> >
> 
> Agree. good advice. one should not always follow the crowd, if we all
> did, then we'll probably be still cooking our food over a fire under
> open sky in some forest somewhere. (humm.. come to think of it, that does
> not sound that bad :)
> 

I agree strongly with both ideas!

	Jorgie
> Nasser

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Peter Hermann]

jorgie (jorgie@box.net.au) wrote:
> I agree strongly with both ideas!

it's nice to see your opinion but are you aware that you are wasting 
bandwidth in simply repeating 100 lines of text and adding just one
from you. That is not fair.   :-(

--
Peter Hermann  Tel:+49-711-685-3611 Fax:3758 ph@csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de
Pfaffenwaldring 27, 70569 Stuttgart Uni Computeranwendungen
Team Ada: "C'mon people let the world begin" (Paul McCartney)

Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Anonymous]

On Fri, 18 Jul 1997 17:10:26 -0700, safetran <safetran@kaiwan.com>
wrote:

> Hi all 
> 
> I am looking for opinions on whether you think the Ada language is going
> to be around in the next 5 years ?  How about 10 years ? 
> 

Ada is the language of choice for very large systems and for
safety-critical systems. Boeing and Airbus chose Ada for their avionics
SW development, most nuclear reactor systems are in Ada, and just about
every country in the world except the USA has an air traffic control
system written in Ada. The language is not going to disappear anytime
soon.

As for finding Ada people, it seems to be a fact of the community that
employers have trouble finding good people, and people have trouble
finding good jobs. This does not mean there are not good people looking
for work or good jobs looking for people.

Jeff Carter  PGP:1024/440FBE21
My real e-mail address: ( carter @ innocon . com )
"Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail

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