Re: What ever happened to Ada

[fjh@mundook.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson)]

dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

>Noam Kloos said
>
>  "It is just that i was testdriving the Gnat for Windows95 the first time
>  and simply compiled the hello.adb. Then tried to run the executable on
>  an old XT 8088 machine and got the message : 'this program cannot be run
>  in MSDOS mode'.
>  This seems to me a bit absurd and analog to over bureaucracy."
>
>Why on earth would you expect a 386 executable to run on an 8088? These
>are radically different arhitectures, you might as well have tried running
>the executable on a Mac or a Unix machine!

It sounds like Noam Kloos might have been happier if his XT had just
crashed, rather than getting a sensible error message.  At least then
he wouldn't have thought the problem was due to "over bureaurocracy".

Perhaps this explains the success of C ;-)

--
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>   |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>   |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh@128.250.37.3         |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.