Re: "Forced to Use Ada"

[raveling@vaxb.isi.edu (Paul Raveling)]

In article <6153@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> rjh@cs.purdue.EDU (Bob Hathaway) writes:
>In article <4624@hubcap.UUCP>, ofut@hubcap.UUCP (A. Jeff Offutt) writes:
>> 
>> C'mon, be careful what you say.  As a scientist/engineer, I do not want
>> anybody *mandating* the use of technology without clear *technical* proof
>> that that is in every case the best solution. ...
>
>Its not the language which is important its the facilities it provides.  
>Does any of the above languages provide all of the necessary and desirable
>constructs to provide well designed software and a method for validating
>correct compilers?  What other language provides concurrency, dynamic
>exception handling, generics, reasonable encapsulation constructs, Adts,
>complete control structures, variable number of parameters with defaults,
...
>...  Ada was designed to standardize software and it
>could replace almost any language with exceptions being rare.

	Have you suggested that to a hard-core LISP user lately?

	Standardization is precisely the greatest danger of ADA,
	particularly because the DOD standard doesn't even permit
	extensions.  If we accept the ADA standard we lose the
	option to improve as we learn better ways to approach
	software engineering.

	As for technical merit, there's plenty of room for argument.
	Much of it is in the realm of religion for now, but what's
	clear is that there's no clear agreement.  Having written
	a compiler for an ADA subset, I know of a number of things
	I'd do differently in the language design if the opportunity
	existed.  I'm not fond of ADA -- neither am I utterly pleased
	with C, FORTRAN, PL/I and relatives, ALGOL-60, COBOL, and
	gobs of other languages.
	
	Suppose somone designed a language provably better than these --
	if we mandate an existing standard, such as ADA or C, we risk
	preserving a dinosaur at the expense of suffocating mammals.
	That's my usual comment about UNIX, but it also suits languages.


----------------
Paul Raveling
Raveling@isi.edu