Re: Ada is almost useless in embedded systems

[Alan Brain <aebrain@dynamite.com.au>]

>In article <824056183.18993@assen.demon.co.uk>, john@assen.demon.co.uk (John McCabe) writes:
>> 
>> 
>> 1) Strong typing is very good if your coders are learners or possibly
>> not very good,

Agree. Mice ditto. Keyboards as well. Real Programmers use the Front 
Panel switches, and have their teeth filed to bite holes in the punched 
cards. Anyone who uses Keyboards is a Wimp, Loser and Weenie who does not 
understand Machine Code, and who makes mistakes when coding in binary. 
001000110110 obviously shows which registers you're using, which ALUs and 
even which communications pipeline you have. It is terser (only 2 
different possibilities in each position) and more powerful than 
favourites of the aforementioned Wimps, Losers and Weenies such as 'for 
i++:'.

Sorry, Flame off. But this supercilious balderdash has been repeated too 
long for me to let it go unchallenged.

Look at the recent Byte article "Why Software Projects Fail". One of the 
Cardinal rules set forth for success is to use Assertions. A lot. Any 
Strongly typed language automatically provides sanity-checks every time 
you do an operation, without you having to code it handraullically.

I've programmed for over 20 years in various assemblers, Fortran II, 
Fortran IV, Cobol, Forth, Trac, PLZ/Sys, Ada95, and coded large projects 
in Assemblers, APL, Fortran 77, CMS-2M, CMS-2Y, Meta, C, SMR-2, Pascal, 
Basic (for my sins..), and Ada 83.

I've written complete accounting systems (Client-Server using a GOSH-WOW 
5 Mb!!! Hard Disk costing many thousands of $) in APL. It was Terse. And 
Powerful. But write-only.

I've written hard real-time systems in C, from being involved in the 
second port of Unix into C in 1976 at Sydney University.

Since 1983, I've been working 90% in Ada, 10% in C ( and some C++ 
recently).

I'm sure the next time a significant advance in the art comes along, 
people will complain that Real Programmers use Ada 95, and only Wimps, 
Losers and Weenies use a Virtual Reality Programming System, which is 
only "good if your coders are learners or possibly not very good.".


In the meantime, I'd say that C is great for ameteurs in small projects, 
( hey, even I'd prefer it in many circumstances ), but Ada X, Modula Y or 
Eifel are the languages of choice for professionals who aren't slaves to 
COBOL.