From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,86616b1931cbdae5 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: je@bton.ac.uk (John English) Subject: Re: Is Ada likely to survive ? Date: 1997/08/19 Message-ID: <5td7pt$fuj@saturn.brighton.ac.uk>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 268109048 References: <97081409425535@psavax.pwfl.com> Organization: University of Brighton Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-08-19T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Robert Dewar (dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu) wrote: : John said : <<>Charlton Heston doing Shakespeare? Ugh! That's like asking a : >Cobol programmer to write Ada, or Neil Diamond to sing Gilbert : >and Sullivan... :-)>> Fun to go offtopic about Charlton's thespian talents, isn't it? : I have no opinion about whether Mr. Diamond could sing G&S, but or Abba (no idea about case; is it ABBA? :-) ND was plucked out of thin air; think of someone whose singing you hate... : it is clear that COBOL (please spell the name of the language correctly : in a group which is so sensitive about the spelling of Ada (*)) programmers Oops! Since FORTRAN slipped to Fortran I've grown careless... : can and have written successful Ada code. Indeed this is the case in at least : one of the important deployed mission critical systems in the DoD -- it was : an Ada 95 program, large parts of which were written by programmers whose : previous experience was in COBOL. Perhaps my original post should have said "unreconstructed COBOL programmers" (whatever that might mean)... I'm sure everyone knows one :-) : In fact such statements about COBOL are almost always made out of ignorance : by people who simply do not know COBOL. I don't any more -- I gave it up about 20 years ago, and it's changed a bit since then (as has Fortran/FORTRAN -- they now use years rather than version numbers, presumably to keep up with Microsoft's latest releases of Life, The Universe And Everything [TM] or whatever their word processor is called :-) But hell, pick a language you hate (surely you have one? is IPL-V sufficiently uncontroversial?) and use that instead... : (*) COBOL is *not* a woman's name :-) Damn. Rethink 2nd daughter's name again. Call her Eyepee Ellphive perhaps? :-) No one would believe that Charlton Heston could be so much fun... --------------------------------------------------------------- John English | mailto:je@brighton.ac.uk Senior Lecturer | http://www.comp.it.bton.ac.uk/je Dept. of Computing | fax: (+44) 1273 642405 University of Brighton | ---------------------------------------------------------------