Re: Is C/C++ the future?

[brad@truffula.fp.trw.com (Brad Brahms)]

In article <388a97$en1@dayuc.dayton.saic.com>,
James Hopper  <hopperj@dayton.saic.com> wrote:
>In article <383q62$k0v@truffula.fp.trw.com> Brad Brahms,
>brad@truffula.fp.trw.com writes:
>>While I'm not an Ada enthusiast, our company is one of the biggest
>developers
>>of Ada software.  I have yet to see any large Ada project finish without
>>some other language, usually in the form of C-bindings, to help!  That is
>>not to say there arn't any, but just a view of what I have seen.
>
>This is an unfair and distorted characterization of Ada as being
>incomplete

I never intendend to make Ada seem incomplete.  Only its creators can
say that.  That is clearly not the case.  However, my observation
still stands.  For whatever reasons, many large, but not all Ada projects
require atleast some external code to be written in order to get it to
work.  That also includes non legacy code!

>because it requires in many cases support for other languages.  While i to
>usually have at least some links to C bindings, its kind of hard not to
>when using a Unix based system as the operating system and all the access
>libraries for it are written in C!  No one no matter how much they like
>Ada
>is going to rewrite fully debugged and tested libraries just to have a
>100%
>Ada solution.  But in my experience its fairly uncommon except when
>working
>with legacy software to have to write part of the sytem in C because you
>cant do it in Ada.  There is a big difference in the two cases, and to
>lump them togeather as you have provides a very bad example! How many 
>Large C systems get by without writing at least some assembly??

Oh, and yes, I have worked on large systems based on C.  And no, I
don't recall one line of assembler we had to produce.  Maybe that is
the point.  Ada is it own environment.  Unless you write something in
Ada, you are almost always forced to use some type of binding in
another language to get to it.  Yet, I can write C, FORTRAN, C++,
assembler and have them all link together.

Now, to get away from the which language is better flame war that I
have no interest in getting into, the fact remains, market forces
drive what will survive.  While Sony Beta was technically better than
VHS, VHS won out. While Ada is a powerful language, it use in the US
is still mostly in DoD.  Commercially in the US, C & C++ are used.  I
believe it is this market penetration and force that will end up
dictating the language(s) that survive.  An example of how limited the
government can influance a choice is the lack of a metric system in
the US.  That plan was for us was to all be using metric as of several
years ago.  The market force, in this case people, resisted and it died.

My mom told me never to play with fire. :-)
-- 
--
"Life is like a box of chocolates..."	-- Bradley Brahms
					   TRW
					   brad@truffula.fp.trw.com