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From: Jim Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: Porting Ada to C (Stealth development)
Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2002 20:43:21 GMT
Date: 2002-01-17T20:43:21+00:00	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <3C47375B.8060604@worldnet.att.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: a26o04$jfc$1@news.btv.ibm.com

Dale Pontius wrote:

> I am taking up some new work, and would like to do it in Ada. However
> there is a strong 'Do it in C so others can pick it up' bias, which I
> guess makes some sense. So I'd like to do my development in Ada, and


Actually, it makes no sense, but opening that can or worms begins the
language war. If a person is a competent C programmer he or she should
be able to learn a new language with minimal effort. My own experience
is that it was easier to learn Ada, knowing C first, than it was to
read and understand a lot of C programs.

I am now in the business of training people in computer languages.
I have little patience for the argument that learning a new language
is a significant barrier to productivity.


> have the occasional conversion to C to play well with others. This
> probably needs to be free, as well, since it wouldn't cost money if
> if I just started the project in C. (Can't justify) I did a quick scan
> at www.adahome.org without luck. I'll also need to link in C libs, but
> that should be straightforward and in the documentation.
> 


When you say "play well with others", do you mean that others will
take over the maintenance of the C pieces, or simply that others will
want to call the Ada libraries from C? These are really two different
issues, and should be handled separately.


> At the moment, I'm not going to fight any sort of C vs Ada battles,
> and I'd just as soon keep it completely under the table. Iff I start
> to show spectacular developmental speed and track record for bugs,
> then I might surface it. I may have managed to win a minor VHDL vs
> Verilog fight for part (but not all) of the project, because Verilog
> couldn't describe everything that needed done as simply as VHDL. I'm
> not going to push my luck.
> 


Is there already any history of mixed-language development for your
team? This includes such pieces as shell scripts, perl scripts,
C++ libraries, or assembler routines. My guess is that your product
already uses some mixture of C and other languages. This situation
is not currently a political problem. Try to deal with Ada in this
light.


> So for the moment, I need an Ada to C converter, and comments on how
> human-readable the resulting code is.


Good luck.

Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado USA




  parent reply	other threads:[~2002-01-17 20:43 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 23+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2002-01-17 14:44 Porting Ada to C (Stealth development) Dale Pontius
2002-01-17 19:47 ` Dan Andreatta
2002-01-18 14:12   ` Dale Pontius
2002-01-18 19:15     ` Dan Andreatta
2002-01-18 22:44       ` Zoran
2002-01-18 23:13     ` Frode Tennebø
2002-01-18 17:13   ` Ray Blaak
2002-01-20 19:43     ` Nick Roberts
2002-01-21 11:13   ` Peter
2002-01-17 20:43 ` Jim Rogers [this message]
2002-01-18 14:19   ` Dale Pontius
2002-01-18 16:29     ` Larry Hazel
2002-01-18 17:21       ` Ray Blaak
2002-01-18 18:14         ` Larry Hazel
2002-01-18 20:25           ` tmoran
2002-01-19  7:32             ` Simon Wright
2002-01-19 18:58           ` Ray Blaak
2002-01-18 17:18     ` Stephen Leake
2002-01-18 23:04     ` Brian Rogoff
2002-01-19  7:34       ` Simon Wright
2002-01-20 17:32         ` Brian Rogoff
2002-01-18 19:48 ` Ted Dennison
2002-01-18 20:02   ` Wes Groleau
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