Re: Microsoft & Ada

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

Samuel T. Harris wrote:
> > I once heard that Microsoft will develop their Visual Ada++. Is that true.

Dream on. But then, considering the lack of interest of the
development community in Visual J++, may be, they start to
look for something else one day. Don't forget that you are talking
about an environment where Ada is known as a late 1970 non-sexy
military language, and where most people have never even heard of
Ada95.

> I remember visiting the Microsoft booth at the Air Force Small Computer
> Conference at Gunther AFB while I was an Air Force officer. This was
> sometime in 1986/1987 time frame. I asked the representative about
> all those Microsoft compilers (C, FORTRAN, COBOL, Pascal) and what
> were their plans for producing an Ada compiler? He laughed in my face!
> I went to that conference 3 years in a row and got the same response
> from 3 different Microsoft reps :)

I asked Microsoft something similar in 1990 at CeBIT, a big German
computer fair. Same response. They probably should read in the
latest Byte issue the article about the causes for the frequent
Windows crashes, where the safety problems of C/C++ are listed
as one of the major reasons for the notorious unreliability of
applications on Microsoft platforms. Microsoft never had to get
some peice of code through an FAA software safety certification.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Security Group, Computer Lab, Cambridge University, UK
email: mkuhn at acm.org,  home page: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>