Re: How many different processors do you use?

["Matt Cox" <mcox@compd.com>]

Not wanting to go into the wheres and wherebys that restricts Ada usage to
mostly military products, if you think that Ada is badly supported then go
and have a look at the Rational toolset (Statement, Rose, multiple
X-Compilers, integrated environment, blah, blah, blah...)

Matt Cox

<Snip>
>1. The Ada comittee went and created their own syntak, and increased
>the learning curve.
>
>2. The Reagen adminstration was so anti-gov that they didn't fund a
>quality free or at least cheap Ada development system for education, and
>small companies.  An Ada development system could cost upto 10,000 $ for
>a bad product.
>
>3. Ada's requirements on compiliers made them more expensive, and very
>hard to do on DSP, and small embedded Processors.  This meant that
>Chip manufactures were reluctant to fund development.
>
>4. The high costs of using Ada prevented widespread use outside the
>defense industry.
>
>5. As said before, the government blind insistance that Ada was the
>choice for everything, embittered the defense companies and their
>Engineers.
>
>6. All of the above has created a situlation, where staffing Ada
>programmers is very, very difficult.  Many companies have given up and
>switched back to C/C++ including mine.  This problem was made much
>worst by the current engineering market, where people need and want to
>be able to move often.  Knowing Ada is not a big plus outside defense
>and a few related fields.
>
>7.  The killer is that defense programs run for years and thus you like
>to start with the state of the Art Processors.  Since Ada is not a
>popular language it is almost never supported at the start of a
>Processor life cycle.