Re: problems/risks due to programming language

[kassover@control.crd.ge.com (David Kassover)]

Wow, we are getting vicious, aren't we?

In article <PIERSON.90Feb22110501@xenna.encore.com> pierson@encore.com (Dan L. Pierson) writes:
>In article <5017@csv.viccol.edu.au> dougcc@csv.viccol.edu.au (Douglas Miller) writes:
>   Valid but utterly vacuous point, as ADA *was* designed to provide maximal
>   support for software engineering.  I suppose its possible that another
>   (hidden?) design goal was to "have everything".  So what?
>
>   >    Software engineering can be done in any language, including C.
...
>
>This bit of ADA mythology (or dogma) has also been made too many times
>for me to remain silent.  Yes, ADA did have a goal of maximal support
>for the software engineering process.  However other goals (and the
...
>but I'm just plain tired of the line that ADA is equivalent to
>software engineering because the DOD and those who base their careers
>on it say so.
>Internet: pierson@encore.com

Ada vs C vs Pascal vs.... and mythology
 
 
I think what I am going to write as follows are verifyable facts.
I am not responsible for things not turning out as they were
intended...
 
 
Ada was designed by a committee (!!???  we can argue the merits
of that elsewhere) which had certain aspects of the computer
programming process that they wanted to address.  Many of these
aspects were based on real life experience  (E.G. real-time
programming, needing to acknowledge error conditions that make
continuance undesirable)  The committee succeeded in answering
most of the desires, and where there was an irresolvable
conflict, chose.  Therefore, we have goto statements, no
conditional compile, etc.

Pascal was designed by an individual who had as his primary
concern the production of a testbed from which to teach computer
language design  (or was it computer language compiler design.
NOT THE SAME THING!)  Furthermore, this individual was a
proponent of a restrictive structured programming theory.
Therefore, we have a rather incomplete language with some
extremely annoying features.

C, and Unix, were built, at least initially, by an individual who
wanted to take a crack at building an operating system from
scratch, on a more or less scrapped piece of hardware, while
employed by an employer which was more or less liberal about such
activities.  Therefore we have a language, and OS, which is
simple, and does some things very well indeed, but addresses
other things not at all.


Now, we're back to educated opinion.  Ada, as implemented, did
not achieve all it's goals.  But I submit that it acheived many
of them;  that not all stated goals were even in the original
mix; and that the set of goals was broader in scope than the goal sets
of either C or Pascal.

A long time ago, when I knew less than I do now, I said that Ada,
as specified, was the embodiment of what a Pascal programmer
thought a Cobol programmer ought to have at his disposal.  I
stand by that statement today.  But still, for me, as a programmer
working on a production job, Ada is the language of choice, all
other things being equal  (which they rarely are).  For a
personal programming job that is not likely to ever be touched by
other than me, the language of choice is FORTRAN, simply because
that is the first computer programming language I learned after
BASIC (a very long time ago!), again all other things being equal.


I would like to see this newsgroup return to discussions of Ada
and implementations of Ada.  Or maybe we could create a
sub-newsgroup like comp.lang.flame??  8-)

Dave