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: 103376,5faad1722103f6a7 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!news.glorb.com!wn14feed!worldnet.att.net!63.223.4.70!c01.usenetserver.com!news.usenetserver.com!elnk-atl-nf1!newsfeed.earthlink.net!stamper.news.atl.earthlink.net!newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net.POSTED!d9c68f36!not-for-mail Message-ID: <40C44F24.8010902@noplace.com> From: Marin David Condic User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823 Netscape/7.0 (OEM-HPQ-PRS1C03) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics References: <90Stc.15309$be.3117@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net> <40b86431$0$186$edfadb0f@dread11.news.tele.dk> <40B888E0.5040707@noplace.com> <40B8C86A.3050302@noplace.com> <40BE6BFD.8030305@noplace.com> <40BF141F.8020001@noplace.com> <40C38E7C.64564F@notes.udayton.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2004 11:19:37 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 165.247.64.46 X-Complaints-To: abuse@earthlink.net X-Trace: newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net 1086607177 165.247.64.46 (Mon, 07 Jun 2004 04:19:37 PDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2004 04:19:37 PDT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:1187 Date: 2004-06-07T11:19:37+00:00 List-Id: Cobol hit the world at a time when the only other programming language choices were Fortran and assembler. For those who had work that looked like business data processing, it was a no-brainer: There was nothing else that even remotely met their needs. Cobol suffered from lots of things like excessive verbosity and clumsy control structures, but it was either that or go use Fortran or assembler. Once it got established, there was no way to eradicate it. Ada, OTOH tried to address the needs of embedded systems programmers and missed the mark for a variety of reasons. Probably chief among them was that embedded programmers already had something - C - which was cheap and small and could be made to fit just about any processor - and was available for just about any microprocessor. Ada was huge and cost a fortune and couldn't be made to work for small microprocessors and was not available for most targets. Given that people had choices and Ada wasn't meeting their needs, mandate or not, they went elsewhere. The moral of the story: Find out what the customer wants/needs before you build a huge product and try to sell it to them. MDC Leon Winslow wrote: > > > There is an irony here that most people might not appreciate. COBOL was > the first language mandated by the federal government. I don't know if > Ada was the second or there were one or more other languages in between > these two. > > Some interesting questions might be: Why was one more widely used than > the other. What did the government do differently with COBOL and Ada > and what effect did it have? > > Lee Winslow > -- ====================================================================== Marin David Condic I work for: http://www.belcan.com/ My project is: http://www.jsf.mil/NSFrames.htm Send Replies To: m o d c @ a m o g c n i c . r "Face it ladies, its not the dress that makes you look fat. Its the FAT that makes you look fat." -- Al Bundy ======================================================================