Ada Vs. COBOL -- Looking for Information

Ada Vs. COBOL -- Looking for Information

[Edward Berard]

Recently, I have talked to a number of MIS (Management Information
Systems) professionals regarding the use of Ada technology in an
environment which has been traditionally made use of COBOL, RPG,
Fourth Generation Languages (4GLs), and classic DeMarco - Conastantine
Structured Analysis and Structured Design, i.e., the typical business
or MIS environment. The people I have been talking with have a number
of observations which they conveyed to me:

   1. They believed that most Ada compilers (in fact, any in the
      forseeable future) generate object code which is larger and
      slower than the object code which is produced for similar
      programs by COBOL compilers. One organization showed me a
      "benchmark" in which a company (well-known in the Ada community)
      had attempted to duplicate CICS (Customer Information Control
      System) in Ada. The Ada version was more than 50% slower and
      larger than the COBOL version.

   2. They asked me to identify any large organizations in the U.S.,
      which were capable of bidding on government contracts, which had
      both substantial MIS with Ada experience. They did not believe
      that there were any.

   3. Although several DBMS (Data Base Management System) vendors
      claim to have an Ada interface to their products, when asked to
      produce these interfaces, the vendors admitted that the Ada
      interfaces were "still under development." Typically, the
      salesforces for these vendors were blissfully ignorant of the
      existence of any such interfaces.

   4. Those who advertise courses with themes such as "Ada for
      Business" or "Ada for COBOL Programmers" typically teach their
      students to write COBOL using Ada syntax and semantics, i.e.,
      "AdaBOL." The MIS professionals used this as a strong argument
      against ugoing to Ada technology. "Why," they said, "should I
      duplicate my current technology in a new language?"

I am looking for substantiated warstories, benchmarks, products, et
cetera, on Ada in a business environment. For example, while there is
currently no standard Ada SQL binding, are there any any Ada SQL
products available? Please send the information directly to me
(eberard@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu) and I will post a summary of the results.

				-- Ed Berard
				   (301) 695-6960

Re: Ada Vs. COBOL -- Looking for Inform

[callen]

>  1. They believed that most Ada compilers (in fact, any in the
>     forseeable future) generate object code which is larger and
>     slower than the object code which is produced for similar
>     programs by COBOL compilers. One organization showed me a
>     "benchmark" in which a company (well-known in the Ada community)
>     had attempted to duplicate CICS (Customer Information Control
>     System) in Ada. The Ada version was more than 50% slower and
>     larger than the COBOL version.

I would like to add a few details and corrections to this comment.

The comparison was between two CICS transactions, one coded in Ada and
the other in Cobol. For those not "in the know", CICS is a teleprocessing
monitor for IBM systems that has been around since the early 1960's. CICS
can be considered a mini-operating system; thus, the Ada runtime system had
to be retargeted to this new "OS". The test was performed on a VERY early
release of the new RTS. The Ada transaction was coded first (and to a tight
deadline); the Cobol version came later as a VERY simple attempt to gather
some INITIAL data comparing Ada and Cobol. I must emphasize that the Ada
runtime system and CICS interface used was VERY preliminary; it is by no
means optimal. The Cobol RTS and interface code has had 2 decades to
mature.

The fact that the Ada came in 50% slower than the Cobol was NOT
particularly surprising, given these conditions. The figure can EASILY
be improved. This single, primitive data point has been blown COMPLETELY
out of proportion.

It is worth noting that the size of the object code for the actual
"mainline" program is SMALLER than that of the Cobol program! The
runtime system swamped this fact. Object code quality is BY NO MEANS
the problem, and as I said earlier, the RTS can be (and is being)
improved.

In case you can't tell, I wrote both the Ada and (shudder) Cobol code
for this "benchmark" (such as it is). Many years ago I did commercial
programming for online systems in Cobol. I KNOW Cobol. Why I'm admitting
this in public I don't know. :-)   I have been writing Ada for 2 years,
I think it's fair to say that I KNOW Ada, too. I can see advantages and
disadvantages to writing data processing code in Ada rather than Cobol.
But to use this ONE crude test to claim that "Cobol outperforms Ada by
50%" is baloney.

-- Jerry Callen
   Intermetrics, Inc.
   733 Concord Ave.
   Cambridge, MA 02138
   (617) 661-1840

   Internet: callen@inmet.inmet.com
   UUCP:     ...{harvard,ihnp4,ima}!inmet!callen