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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,971aa11c293c3db1 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-07-18 21:13:11 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!newsfeed.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!canoe.uoregon.edu!arclight.uoregon.edu!wn4feed!worldnet.att.net!135.173.83.71!wnfilter1!worldnet-localpost!bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3B565EC1.DE2EEF0F@worldnet.att.net> From: James Rogers X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada The Best Language? References: <5be89e2f.0107170838.c71ad61@posting.google.com> <9j1uio$8br$1@nh.pace.co.uk> <5be89e2f.0107171810.1cee29c0@posting.google.com> <3B55C6B0.C2ED36@san.rr.com> <5be89e2f.0107181251.2a616bc4@posting.google.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 04:12:24 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 12.86.33.244 X-Complaints-To: abuse@worldnet.att.net X-Trace: bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net 995515944 12.86.33.244 (Thu, 19 Jul 2001 04:12:24 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 04:12:24 GMT Organization: AT&T Worldnet Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:10226 Date: 2001-07-19T04:12:24+00:00 List-Id: codesavvy wrote: > > Darren New wrote in message news:<3B55C6B0.C2ED36@san.rr.com>... > > codesavvy wrote: > > > > > > I don't care if you think I'm trolling, I'm not. I think the answer > > > is rather obvious, Ada has nothing to offer that is substantially > > > better than what C++ offers. > > > > Does C++ offer built in and portable multitasking, protected objects, > > real-time performance, built-in portable interrupt interfacing, > > distributed programming? > > No but do you have any data that measures how much more productive an > Ada developer is using these features? BTW I like these features in > Ada 95 a lot. I doubt, however, that producitivity is increased > significantly by having them available. I do not have a study, but I do have an example from my own experience. I worked in a company doing real time robotics development. Part of that work involved active participation on the Working Group for the US Army's Joint Architecture for Unmanned Ground Systems. Other participants represented other companies, the Army, the Navy, the Department of Energy, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and some universities. My group was the only group using Ada. All the other groups were using C++. Over a period of two years my group was able to implement, from the ground up, a complete system using the initial version of the JAUGS architecture standard. No other group came even close. Now, it could have been the size of our development team. After all, we had the advantage of doing all our work with a three person team. The other groups were hampered by the existence of much larger teams. We were also the only team to attempt a design using concurrency. Our system had about 75 tasks running on the vehicle control unit and another 50 tasks running on the operator control unit. All the other teams were using very rigidly designed nested control loops. Now, I know this probably is no measure of productivity, but our solution was also highly configurable in terms of the complexity of our target vehicle. No recoding was needed to move the controls from a bulldozer to a forklift, even though the control algorithms for tracked and wheeled vehicles are quite different. No other team even attempted such flexibility. One small example of Ada productivity advantage was the development of a generic protected bounded queue. It took less than one day to code and test this little item, which was a critical element both in our design and in the overall JAUGS architecture. The equivalent functionality in C++ took other teams weeks to code and test. Jim Rogers Colorado Springs, Colorado USA