Re: Creating markets (long)

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <34tetc$dmk@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>, Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:

>Note that's it's not necessarily easy. IBM put a huge amount of resources into
>trying to promose PL/1 as a successor to COBOL, and clearly failed, although I
>think some of this can be ascribed to lousy early implementations (the Sears
>reversal was a watershed in this process).

I think those of us who were around in the late 60s and early 70s all have
our opinions about what brought PL/I down. Recall that IBM also was hoping
that PL/I would displace _Fortran_. IMHO, they blew it by (gratuitously,
for those times) mapping multidimensional arrays row-major, thereby
crippling the ability to reuse "legacy" Fortran, which mapped column-major.

(I do not think there was any special technical reason to switch to row
major, nor were there row-major languages wiuth which PL/I had to
interface; that's why I said the PL.I design decision was gratuitous.)

It may be sheer coincidence, but I like to think that Ada 83's policy
of letting _implementers_ determine storage mappings was partially a response 
to this. A sharp implementer who wanted to penetrate the Fortran community 
could build a nice interface to legacy Fortran, uninhibited by a gratuitously
incompatible array mapping scheme.

Unfortunately, I don't think any implementers took this possibility seriously,
and as far as I know, Ada implementations all go row-major.

Ada 94's Interfaces.Fortran is taking this seriously, though. Of course,
the Fortran community has taken the ten years to develop the Fortran 
90 standard, which gives them yet another excuse to avoid Ada. Oh well.
(And gives the Ada vendors yet another excuse to avoid trying to
penetrate.)

Mike Feldman
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Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5253 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)
"Pork is all that stuff the government gives the other guys."
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