Re: Ada in Iraq

[john@nospam.demon.co.uk (John McCabe)]

On Fri, 25 Apr 2003 11:46:01 -0400, Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
wrote:

>Samuel Tardieu wrote:
>> I don't think so. The "point" assumes that what was to blame was the
>> insufficient knowledge of C++, and that this knowledge has not been
>> acquired. What if the problem was in fact C++ itself?
>
>Well, that's not what the e-mail said. It specifically blamed lack
>of experience with the language, not the language itself. Since
>neither of us was there, we have no evidence to gainsay the claim.

It is quite reasonable to hypothesise (as Sam has) that 'lack of
experience' is an subjective view. That may not be the real problem,
just the problem as seen by the person who wrote the original message.

The language itself, and more specifically the fact that it doesn't
explicitly provide mechanisms for programming concurrent, safe and
complicated systems (much of this needs to be provided by the
operating system or by non-standard compiler extensions in C++) could
be at least one of the major problems with this development.

Ada on the other hand has all this functionality built in to the
language in a standard manor (sic:-). What is also not addressed in
the original message is what experience the team did have prior to its
use of C++. If it had been something like Pascal, Modula-2 etc (i.e.
those languages that were similar to Ada) then moving to Ada could
have been a relatively straightforward transition however moving to
C++ could have been far more difficult.

John

Best Regards
John McCabe

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