Re: Why C++ is successful

[Jay Martin <jaymmartin@earthlink.net>]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> Jay says
> 
> <<Actually, I am pretty sure Ada83 that was supposed to have garbage collection
> in non-embedded environments as there were official features to turn "automatic
> storage reclaimation" off.  Unfortunately, it wasn't a hard implementation
> requirement and in the DOD world of $5000 toilet seats....   This is another
> example of DOD mismanagement of Ada and its sad to admit in retrospect
> that the Ada scoffers were right (DOD and competent language management
> do not mix).  Russia leaving the cold war business didn't help Ada either.
> Oh well, the time to get on the Ada bandwagon was 15 years ago.
> >>
> 
> No, that is wrong, Ada83 was not "supposed" to have GC, it was supposed to
> ensure that GC was practical if it was needed. As for DoD mismanagement,
> this is a truly peculiar statement. Any Ada vendor would have been happy
> to provide GC to a customer who wanted it and was willing to pay. In fact
> my memory at ALsys was we never had EVEN ONE customer who was interested
> enough in GC to even ask about it. The same is true in our experience with
> GNAT.
> No customer has ever asked for GC, and they certainly have asked for many
> other things.

If you are doing embedded systems, then you can't use GC.  Unfortunately,
this dooms Ada to that niche.

Go to the source, what does Ichbiah say?  Hey Ichy, did you expect
(in 1983) for Ada83 systems for doing non-embedded applications, say business
apps, to have GC?  I would be amazed if he says no.  Look at the
Ada Booch components, not a single "free" in the whole library. 
Surely, he Booch was expecting GC.

> 
> You can of course use conservative GC's of various varieties with most
> Ada 83 and Ada 95 compilers. I never bumped into an Ada application that
> took advantage of this possibility.
> 
> I think that the DoD would have been way out of line dictating what particular
> implementation characteristics were needed in implementations of Ada, instead
> of leaving this up to the individual projects.

They can turn off the GC. I don't see what your problem with having a
GC requirement on a Ada83 for a business system. 

IMHO, the DOD free market Ada compiler experiment was a complete failure.  
Free markets don't work in the defense field. The should have paid a
set of Ada vendors whatever $$$ it took (maybe you) back in early 80's to
build and maintain a suite of Ada compilers and then gave them all away
for massive number of system configurations. Heh, there should have been
GCC_Ada1, GCC_Ada2 and GCC_Ada3.  Then they should have paid massive bucks
to these venders to have every system library known to man to have an Ada
version almost immediately.  How many billions would it have taken for success?

> 
> The fact that users of Ada did not ask for Jay's pet-feature-of-the-day has
> nothing to do with mismanagement, and everything to do with actual requirements.

The mismanagement is that the DOD did not push Ada beyond the immediate
requirements of defense embedded systems.  Its a chicken or the egg
situation:  You can't portably rely on GC until a good number of compilers
support it, so nobody uses it and thus there is no pressing demand for it.
This is where management needs to step in and break the cycle.

Jay