Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <7jm5pa$ome$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <7jk7hk$36s$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> > In article <7jjij7$qci$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> >   muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> > > 1. The Ada comittee went and created their own syntak, and
> > > increased the learning curve.
> >
> > Committee? what committee?
> I read someones' website and your right, but that was the
> belief.  There certainly was an approval commitee that took
> too long.

If you think an international standard can be achieved any
quicker than it was, you just don't know how standards proceed.
FYI, the Ada standard process was FAR FAR faster than the C
or C++ processes.

> > > 2. The Reagen adminstration was so anti-gov that they
didn't
> > > fund a quality free or at least cheap Ada development
system
> > > for education, and small companies.
> >
> > This claim is not even vagely related to reality.
>
> It was a major factor.

(lots of irrelevant stuff snipped)

Nope! You completely missed what I said was not related
to reality, and that is the claim that the failure to support
a quality free Ada development system was due to some kind of
Reagan anti-gov attitude, that's complete nonsense. And I am
the person to know, since I am the person who lobbied for this
for many years, and finally succeeded with Chris Anderson's
support in getting this to happen.

> That would be chicken feed compare to what the Ada effort
> failure has costed.

First, I don't see an "Ada effort failure" here. I see many
successful projects that continue to use Ada in an effective
way. Individual companies may have screwed things up for
themselves but don't assume that generalizes to everyone!

> It certainly wasn't a small factor for us, and it prevented
> Ada from gaining any widespread use as a lab tool development
> language, and
> prevented electrical engineers from having access.  10k is a
> whole lot of money for a University,

Your 10K figure is a bogus one picked out of the air. Many
universities had Ada, none I know paid anywhere near 10K.

> > > 5. As said before, the government blind insistance that
Ada
> > > was the choice for everything, embittered the defense
> > > companies and their Engineers.
> >
> > I don't think so, some contractors and engineers were
annoyed,
> > others ignored the mandate in any case, others embraced it
and
> > became enthusiastic supporters.
>
> At least NVL viewed it as an all or nothing deal.  We had a
> signal processing intensive application that we wanted to do
> on 2 320c25 DSP's which had no Ada support.  At the time
> (1985-88) there
> was not an Ada supporting processor that could do the Signal
> processing
> at a reasonable rate.  The signal processing was pretty much a
> fixed process once designed, and all the SW that was likely to
> change was on one processor.  We offered to use a 680x0
> processor with
> Ada for the second processor, but that wasn't a pure solution.

Sounds like quite a bit of mismanagement there to me!

> In addition, the government raised our SW costs by 2x by
insisting that
> it either be Ada or assembly and thus no C.  Since the 320c25
or the
> Motorala 5600 DSP had C compliers, but no Ada we wrote
everything in
> Assembly instead of just the inner loops.

You had other alternatives, again sounds like bad management.
For one thing, the Ada mandate absolutely did not apply in
cases where no Ada compiler was available, so either your
facts are distorted, or you REALLY had a case of completely
messed up management.

It sounds in general like things were mismanaged. Ada is not
some magic cure-all for bad management!

If you can't get Ada programmers to work in your environment,
perhaps it is because there is something wrong with your
environment. Lots of other Ada shops I know manage to attract
and retain good people.





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