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: 103376,6a7cfec93e22adfc X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2002-03-04 12:10:35 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: AdaMax? (was: ada to C++ translation) Date: 4 Mar 2002 12:10:34 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Message-ID: <4519e058.0203041210.5f878d07@posting.google.com> References: <3c81060d$1@giga.realtime.net> <5ee5b646.0203021621.ce5a579@posting.google.com> <3c838b53@giga.realtime.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: 65.115.221.98 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1015272635 18016 127.0.0.1 (4 Mar 2002 20:10:35 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 4 Mar 2002 20:10:35 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:20782 Date: 2002-03-04T20:10:35+00:00 List-Id: "Ira D. Baxter" wrote in message news:<3c838b53@giga.realtime.net>... > But I'm not the marketplace, and it doesn't > always do what we personally think is technically > rational. Clearly you have to go where you think your money is as a tool vendor. That's perfectly understandable. However, you need to be very careful in making cross-market analogies... > If you remember BetaMax VCRs, they were technically > better than VHS. But the only VCR survivors > made the arguably rational business decision to go with VHS. Sigh. The old "BetaMax" argument again? The driving of BetaMax from the marketplace was not irrational at all, technically or economicly. First off, BetaMax wasn't inarguably technicly superior. Beta format had a more limited recording time than VHS, and that was important to some people. But more importantly, BetaMax was a proprietary standard that one company owned and tried to milk as a revenue source in and of itself (by refusing to release it to other companies w/o huge license fees). VHS was a free industry standard. So suddenly there were 2 VCR universes: one with no real competition between VCR makers and one with oodles of it. Tapes didn't work with both, so consumers got to choose the winner. A bit of basic microeconomics will tell you that the result of this situation is almost a forgone conclusion. What does all of this have to do with Ada? Damn near nothing. If we had to make an analogy into the videocassete market, VCR's (and their formats) would be machine languages (CPUs, OS's, programming platforms, etc.), tapes would be the executable programs, and programming languages would be sort of analogous to the the camera techniques used to film the original shows before they transfered to tape. If damn near everyone else uses an inferior or inefficient one, there's no real reason that has to affect a content developer's choice at all. A tool vendor would certianly prefer to make tools targeted to that larger camera technique user-base (assuming that market isn't oversaturated). But this has nothing whatsever to do with Beta vs. VHS. -- T.E.D. Home - mailto:dennison@telepath.com (Yahoo: Ted_Dennison) Homepage - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html