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: f849b,d275ffeffdf83655 X-Google-Attributes: gidf849b,public X-Google-Thread: 146b77,d275ffeffdf83655 X-Google-Attributes: gid146b77,public X-Google-Thread: 115aec,d275ffeffdf83655 X-Google-Attributes: gid115aec,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,d275ffeffdf83655 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dennison@telepath.com Subject: Re: Ada vs C++ vs Java Date: 1999/01/15 Message-ID: <77og6i$3pg$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 433090526 References: <369C1F31.AE5AF7EF@concentric.net> <369D1F2B.138D1FB8@pwfl.com> <369E4A41.8D7DDA14@west.raytheon.com> <369F87EE.88403F96@west.raytheon.com> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x7.dejanews.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 204.48.27.130 Organization: Deja News - The Leader in Internet Discussion X-Article-Creation-Date: Fri Jan 15 22:41:23 1999 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.vxworks,comp.realtime,comp.arch.embedded X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.5 [en] (WinNT; I) Date: 1999-01-15T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <369F87EE.88403F96@west.raytheon.com>, Ken Keys wrote: > Maybe I should give some background. I am pretty much an agnostic when > it comes to language issues. I had always thought of Ada as "Pascal with > an attitude" although Ada has a lot of nice features that were missing > from Pascal. As such, I never saw much use for the Rendezvous (which > isn't explained very well in most Ada texts). I figured that it was > something that was added to the language spec to satisfy some ivory > tower academic. A year or so ago a colleague enlightened me with some In the obsolete version of Ada, rendezvous were the only way to synchronize tasks. Therefore if two tasks needed to reference a non-scalar object safely, rendezvous *had* to be used. There's nothing "ivory tower" about it. Code just would not work properly without them! > examples of just what could be done with the Rendezvous. However when I > asked him if he had ever used any in his production code, the answer was > no. He used the underlying OS primitives just like everybody else. I have worked on 5 Ada83 projects. Of those 3 used tasking. I did see some use of external synchronization methods for special purposes (eg: VMS locks to synchronize tasks running on different machines in a VaxCluster), but I never saw anyone use OS calls for a job that rendezvous could handle. Frankly the whole idea is somewhat appalling; much akin to hearing that someone only uses integer types because "strong typing is slow and cramps my style". (Whoops! Let's please not start a strong/weak typeing flamewar too..) T.E.D. -----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own