Re: "Subtract C, add Ada"

[bishopm@source.asset.com (Michael M. Bishop)]

In article <3ehcik$lc0@oahu.cs.ucla.edu>,
Jay Martin <jmartin@oahu.cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
>mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) writes:
>
>>In article <D1wKJn.HAu@seas.ucla.edu>,
>>Jay M. Martin <jaym@breeze.seas.ucla.edu> wrote:
>>>[snip]
>
>>Actually, he published it twice. One paper was in TRI-Ada '91, which
>>got the Best Paper award in that conference; the other was in Communications
>>of the ACM, in the Ada section of the November 1992 issue.
>
>>You really ought to check your facts before making these generalizations.
>>Maybe _ask_ first whether John published anything on this. He's also
>>discussed it in numerous panels in both SIGCSE and SIGAda circles.
>
>>Mike Feldman
>
>I read the abstracts to these papers before I posted, there is not
>one peep about the relative efficiency between C and Ada which
>should be the central topic of discussion in my opinion.
[snip]

Why should the relative efficiency between C and Ada be a central topic
of discussion? (I assume you mean run-time efficiency.) With today's
advanced hardware and improved code-generation techniques, run-time
efficiency is, IMHO, an overrated issue. If this was a pertinent issue,
there should be numerous examples of how using Ada caused a development
team to fail to meet real-time requirements. I haven't see any. (Perhaps
the perception that Ada compilers don't generate efficient code scares
developers away from using Ada for real-time applications.)

The topic of discussion in this thread is that the use of Ada enabled
more of John's students to complete their assignments than the use of
C did. That should be the central topic of discussion. If software can't
be delivered on time or delivered at all, efficiency is the least of the
problems. 

Having developed Motif applications in both C and Ada, I can honestly
say that I've noticed no differences in run-time efficiency between the
two languages. (And this is without removing the run-time checks from
the Ada system.) Having said this, I must add that I haven't gathered
any statistics to support the above claim. But then, I've got better
things to do than collecting run-time statistics.
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