fascist (was: Venus Probe Failure Bug

fascist (was: Venus Probe Failure Bug

[Peter Hermann]

Ben Weiner (bweiner@electron.rutgers.edu) wrote:
: FORTRAN compilers aren't supposed to whinge at the programmer for
: poor style - that's strictly for fascist computer science languages 
: like Pascal or Ada where the compiler is SUPPOSED to prevent the
: programmer from getting any useful work done.

As a German citizen and a friend of the Ada language,
I am particularly hurt about your statement above.
The very reason why I am convinced of the superiority of Ada
is exactly the fact that I am an old Fortran veteran
and, based on your statement above, I am very sure that
you are not able to even serve me the water in the field of Fortran,
although your technical opinions happen to be somewhat correct.
Want to say that I am coming from the spot were you want to go.

Since you obviously never have seen or used one 
single line of Ada code you cannot know the benefits of Ada.

We have developed very large finite element codes on all
major U.S. mainframes in the Fortran language, because 
this was the natural choice of language at that time for
industrial strength software.
But times have changed and today's natural choice
of the serious software engineer
for information systems (formerly COBOL) and real-time systems
and numerical codes for scientific applications
and highly reliable software is clearly Ada95 (ISO-8652).
The best indicator for this is the fact that the Fortran-90
standard continuously tries to copy all features of Ada
since 1983 but will never reach it.

ps.: Auf einen groben Klotz gehoert ein grober Keil.

--
Peter Hermann  Tel:+49-711-685-3611 Fax:3758 ph@csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de
Pfaffenwaldring 27, 70569 Stuttgart Uni Computeranwendungen
Team Ada: "C'mon people let the world begin" (Paul McCartney)