Re: "Ada Bashing" article in Federal Computer Week

[leake@cme-durer.ARPA (Stephe Leake)]

I have done a study (funded by NASA for the Space Station) comparing
Ada and C on Suns and microVAXes. The application was robot
kinematics, and (briefly), the results were:

Ada was easier to code and debug. The Ada development environment (DEC
LSE, VMS) was _much_ nicer than the C environment (DEC C - not a very
friendly compiler). Also, I was able to code more abstractly in Ada,
making the code match the problem statement, which eases debugging.
Since this work, I have done other work in Ada and C, and I find I am
_much_ more productive in Ada (although some of that productivity
comes from VMS vs UNIX).

DEC Ada 1.4 was _Faster_ (by about 25%) than DEC C 2.3 (Hip Hip Hooray!!!)
	(honesty forces me to admit that some of the speed gain came
from using single precision - but how do you get C to use single precision?)

Verdix Ada 5.5 (on the Sun) was slower (by about 10%) than Sun C 3.2
		( good enough for me)

I am interested in publishing this work - can anyone recommend an
appropriate journal?

Anyone else have similar data? Its time us Ada users spoke up.
-- 
NAME:   Stephe Leake                    TELE: (301) 975-3431
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