Re: Ada on comp.lang.c++

[peirce@claris.com (Michael Peirce)]

RE: Flame on Ada by Bob Burch

I'm not sure such a flame deserves a reply, but (against my better
judgement...) I'll give a short one anyway.


This guy seems to have a boat load of preconceived Ada biases.  I doubt he
has ever used a decent Ada environment.  Now maybe he has used AN Ada
environment, but judging a language by one or two bad implementations
is a bit premature.  

I worked on a medium size project (~35 engineers) doing factory automation work.
We switched to Ada in mid-project to improve the quality of our system and
to provide ourselves with a first rate SOFTWARE ENGINEERING environment.  
Ada made a big difference in this project by providing a excellent environment
for well thoughtout design (NOT HACKING - Ada is a horrible hacking language) 
and development coordination.

The environment was DEC's VAX/VMS Ada.  Compile times were reasonable (a tad
slower than Pascal, but it was doing work each compile) and the quality of the
code produced was as good or better than some of DEC's other compilers.

Keep in mind this was a non-DOD related project (no one force Ada down our
throats) and we actually thought Ada had a very positive impact on the project.
Ada has it place (espcially in larger, complicated project that demand a
well thought out (DESIGNED) solution.  I'm sure C++ will have it's place,
but so does Ada.

-- michael
.