Re: Ada Dot Net ?

["John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net>]

For test equipment, using fancy I/O cards, you need to be looking at other
things besides general-purpose programming languages, with or without GUI
toolkits.  Specifically, you need to be looking REAL HARD at National
Instruments down in Austin, with their LabView and LabWindows tools (as I
recall).  They are about as far ahead of MSVC++ as MSVC++ is ahead of the
various PC native Ada compilers.

"William J. Thomas" <WJThomas@WCVT.COM> wrote in message
news:uadamv9fot6vda@corp.supernews.com...
> The company I work for is undergoing a serious process improvement effort,
> we are standardizing on a great many things (thank God one of the things
is
> Ada95 for embedded systems, C comes in a rare second and only when Ada is
> not available). We are also trying to standardize on the languages used
for
> future test equipment software development (this type of software is GUI
> intensive, and makes extensive use of fancy I/O cards).
>
> Many of the software engineers involved in the standardization effort
would
> love to use Ada even for this class of applications, but when push comes
to
> shove Ada can't hold a candle to any of the other languages coupled with
> their GUI environments. The MS Visual Studio supported languages can't be
> beat for their level of integration into the underlying OS and almost
every
> I/O board on the market comes with drivers/APIs for their products.
>
> You can't ask an Ada zealot (in his right mind) to strap on one of the
> existing PC native Ada compilers (with its inferior Windows GUI
development
> environment), have him walk into the current market place and expect him
to
> compete against the likes of ordinance the competition will bring to bear
on
> the same class of problems. That is the reality of the situation, believe
me
> I love Ada (spent my 1st honeymoon at the 2nd International Ada Tech
> conference, gee maybe that's one of the reasons I had to have a second
> honeymoon), but in the area of serious PC Windows based development the
> vendors have fallen short of the mark. And from the responses I received
on
> this posting I can see that the vendors are not doing much (if anything at
> all) to rectify this situation.