From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me
X-Spam-Level: 
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_DATE
	autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4
X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit
X-Google-Thread: 103376,37ed89588a753b4c
X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public
X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1994-10-13 11:29:12 PST
Path: 
 bga.com!news.sprintlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!udel!stimpy.eecis.udel.edu!carroll
From: carroll@stimpy.eecis.udel.edu (Mark C. Chu-Carroll)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: ARPA still undermining Ada
Date: 12 Oct 1994 19:13:13 GMT
Organization: University of Delaware, Newark
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <37hcg9$g3e@louie.udel.edu>
References: <Cx94z7.Jn7@world.std.com> <37ab0v$n82@newsbf01.news.aol.com>
 <37bph1$naq@gnat.cs.nyu.edu> <37egd5$2vt@chnews.intel.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: stimpy-fddi.udel.edu
Date: 1994-10-12T19:13:13+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <37egd5$2vt@chnews.intel.com> kpriest@hopi.intel.com (Kevin Priest~) writes:
>
>I am unable to reconcile the following two positions:
>
>1. ARPA funds research, tries to take a long term view, and is
>interested in technology of the future.
>
>2. ARPA-funded research using Ada has been hindered because there were not 
>free tools available.
>
>Why did not ARPA simply fund the purchase of Ada tools, given their
>long-term view?  It seems incredibly short-sighted of a research
>organization to reject a superior technical solution because they would
>have to pay for the tools!  I'm sorry, Robert, but this defense of ARPA
>simply doesn't wash.

I don't see the difficulty.

When you start a research project, you generally look at what tools
you have available for that research project. That has a huge
influence.

To give an example, I'm a grad student working on a programming
language research project. When I started, we decided that we wanted
to work on parallel programming tools for general purpose parallel
programming. So we started looking for languages to use as a basis for
our work.

In our choice of a base language to work with, there were a number of
factors:

<1> We wanted a language that was actually used by people for
  general purpose programming - particularly using non-array based
  data structures.

<2> We wanted a language with strong typing.

<3> We wanted a languge with good modularity.

So far, it sounds like Ada would be an ideal choice, even if GNAT weren't
available.

But:

<4> We wanted a language where we had access to the source code for
  a compiler. We didn't want to have to rewrite all of the parsing
  and semantic analysis for the base language.

Now, even if you gave us a commercial compiler *for free*, we would
never have chosen Ada - because it would involve far too much effort
just to implement the analysis of the base language.

That kind of thing happens often in research - if you want to do
language work involving extensions of a base language, you really need
to have access to the source code of an implementation of the base
language. Before GNAT, there was no freely available source code to a
complete Ada compiler. And that, essentially, made Ada an unrealistic
choice for a lot of language work.

(As it turns out, we aren't using Ada. We discovered another research
project taking a *very* similar approach to ours, and decided that we
needed to change our direction slightly - so we decided to move more
into a more dynamic language, like CLOS.)

	<MC>
--