Re: A question for my personal knowledge.

[Marin David Condic <condicma@bogon.pwfl.com>]

Siamak Kaveh wrote:
> Accepting that Ada is one of the best available programming languages, the
> following question comes to my mind: Why BIG PLAYERS of computer industry
> (IBM, HP, COMPAQ(Digital), CRAY, Microsoft, SUN...) don't develop their
> native ADA compiler? (or they disconnected their development).
> 
> Do their engineers and managers understand that using ADA can improve
> quality of their software?
> 
This is always a subject that is bound to start a long chain of
reactions. I'll get mine in early! :-)

I think you have to account for the fact that not all decisions are made
on the basis of purely technical criteria. In some cases there are
financial concerns. For example, an existing investment in
infrastructure and training. You can't discount the purely emotional
criteria used by the decision makers. If a lead engineer knows language
X and has little knowledge of language Y, which way is he likely to
lean? Or the fear of trying something new which might put your project
at risk. And you always have the totally irrational factors of
misinformation, rumors and hearsay which can take on qualities of "urban
legend" - largely believed, yet without any basis in fact.

As for the "Big Players" not wishing to develop their own Ada compilers,
ask why they don't want to develop their own compilers for almost any
other language at the same time. To start with, these guys are
*hardware* manufacturers and software in general is not their "core
business". They need to have *some* software developed in house, but
increasingly they want the job outsourced if it doesn't somehow create
competitive advantage for their product. It used to be that all hardware
vendors had their own proprietary operating systems. Now they mostly use
some flavor of Unix, Windows NT or maybe a handful of other things. If
they have in-house developed compilers, probably most of them have been
around for a while and given the choice the hardware vendor would prefer
that it be outsourced, except why bother once its already built?

The only exception I can think of is Java being a product of Sun. Its
easy to figure out what the plot is there. If you get lots of people
developing in Java which targets to a "virtual machine" rather than
native hardware, you have created the excuse why people need to buy
more/faster/bigger hardware, haven't you? Almost by definition, an
interpreted pseudo-machine-language is going to have to take more cpu
cycles than native machine instructions.

It's probably better for the industry if the big hardware vendors
contract out for their compiler technology because it unbundles the
interests of the compiler vendors & users from the interests of the
hardware vendors. As for using Ada (or any other language for that
matter) in their own internal development? I'd say it is their loss -
they ought to consider it but may not for reasons I stated above.

MDC
-- 
Marin David Condic
Real Time & Embedded Systems, Propulsion Systems Analysis
United Technologies, Pratt & Whitney, Large Military Engines
M/S 731-95, P.O.B. 109600, West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600
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