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,b19fa62fdce575f9 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1994-12-02 15:08:51 PST Path: bga.com!news.sprintlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!gwu.edu!gwu.edu!not-for-mail From: mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Why don't large companies use Ada? Date: 2 Dec 1994 16:45:57 -0500 Organization: George Washington University Message-ID: <3bo4il$3lb@felix.seas.gwu.edu> References: <3bcntp$dgj@gnat.cs.nyu.edu> <3be9as$jrh@felix.seas.gwu.edu> <1994Nov30.151523.19742@sei.cmu.edu> <3bmb4r$9kc@gnat.cs.nyu.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: 128.164.9.3 Date: 1994-12-02T16:45:57-05:00 List-Id: In article <3bmb4r$9kc@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>, Robert Dewar wrote: >Note that one significant reason that PL/1 failed was the very poor initial >implementations that IBM produced early on, leading for example to the >rather disastrous reversal of the Sears commitment and their reversion >to COBOL, which had nothing to do with the DoD or procurement as I remember! > At the time, I recall speaking with engineers who walked away from PL/1 _simply_ because it mapped multidimensional arrays row-major, so that interfacing to old Fortran codes required the programmer to tranpose everything on the PL/1 side before passing it to the Fortran subroutine. The Ada 9X Fortran interface - finally - fixes this. Nothing I can see would've prevented an Ada 83 implementation from supporting column-major arrays, as the LRM does not prescribe a mapping. As I've said many times, I think it showed real lack of imagination for Ada vendors to ignore the potentially huge market of new Ada code interfaced to all that Fortran numeric stuff. If _one_ vendor would come forward and say "Mike, we did a serious study of that domain and found that, even if we adapted Ada compilers to suit it, we'd get very few customers," I'd get off this hobbyhorse. Mike Feldman