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: 101deb,af27044bbd8d36a1 X-Google-Attributes: gid101deb,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,86616b1931cbdae5 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: rav@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (robin) Subject: Re: Is Ada likely to survive ? Date: 1997/08/22 Message-ID: <5tj2un$dd2$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 267798061 Expires: 22 November 1997 00:00:00 GMT References: <33D005F2.E5DCD710@kaiwan.com> <5qp3cf$aqc$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <01bc977a$adaf91a0$8cb45ec3@newart.artel.it> <5rrtlt$i99$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <5s6q6b$f3$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <33ECDD08.3724@ibm.net> <5t67ti$5qf$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. NNTP-Posting-User: rav Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.pl1 Date: 1997-08-22T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes: ><getting off the ground.>> >Tell that to the stockholders! Multics most certainly was a failure. And >indeed the aftermath of that failure had a very significant effect, >particularly at Bell. >Sure, from a technical point of view, Multics was a fine system (note >that the designers of Ada were multics based in the early Ada days, >and the required Ada simulator was written for Multics, as well as >the early Alsys bootstrap processor). >However, it was a commercial failure. >PL/1 is a similar story. We're informed that IBM makes quite a bundle from PL/I, and other companies (e.g., Liant and UniPrise) are in the business of supplying PL/I compilers on varous systems. >Sure it is not dead You bet it's not! >(I still think that you >are providing very weak examples, On the contrary, they are excellent examples, and demonstrate the adaptabiity, suiltability & portability of PL/I for large-scale projects. >there are cases, not many, but some, >of major companies doing commercial software in PL/1). Still, given >the IBM intention that the language would effectively replace COBOL >and Fortran, it must be considered a huge failure It's one of the enduring success stories. The features in PL/I were so advanced that the language didn't need continual updating over the years (like some other languages did !). Recall that PL/I has been going for some 30 years now. Some of the features that were advanced for the time include array operations and error interception and handling. >(and indeed is >so-regarded by IBM these days -- that does not mean they will abandon >it, no more than they will abandon OS/2, which is also a failure in >terms of the plans, even though it was a technical succcess, and is >still in wide use).