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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,751584f55705ddb7 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU (Richard A. O'Keefe) Subject: Re: Ada is almost useless in embedded systems Date: 1996/02/21 Message-ID: <4gea0h$ckd@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 140343077 references: <823906039.22113@assen.demon.co.uk> <4g3ljv$mmc@news.pacifier.com> organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-02-21T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: ralw@valiant.gmrc.gecm.com (R.A.L Williams) writes: >To be honest, the engineer in charge of the development didn't >even consider using Ada but, if he had, I would have advised strongly >against it because, leaving aside the issues of large projects and >portability of representation, Ada (83 at least) is IMO far harder to >use than C. This statement, coming from someone with such a background, deserves a fuller exposition. I hope R. A. L. Williams will provide one. My personal experience, having used C since 1979, and Ada only for the last couple of years, is precisely the opposite. I consider myself expert in C; perhaps that's why I thought it was hard to use. I may say that it seems to be easier to _teach_ Ada than to teach C; you can get a heck of a long way without worrying about pointers, and it is so refreshing to be able to answer questions of the form "how do I do X" with "well, it's really a topic for later, but here's how you do it in Ada" instead of "well, there's no language support for that in C in order to keep the compiler simple back in the 70's." (I hope this crashes before the written-in-C operating system crashes again...) -- Election time; but how to get Labour _out_ without letting Liberal _in_? Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~ok; RMIT Comp.Sci.