Re: How many different processors do you use?

[rawcswi@my-deja.com]

In article <7jmmqi$vm2$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <7jm5pa$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:
> > > > 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.

In fairness to muddy_buddy, there is a vague connection to reality--
the Reagan administration did have an effect on funding for
academic research, for example.  And he was talking about the
interpretation of Reagan's policies by those who were (in his
view) responsible for promoting or not promoting Ada.  If the
government during the early 80's had dropped a lot of money
into promoting Ada use in universities, many of them would have
started to use it (it supplied a standardized language with
concurrency, exceptions and other things that the more common
teaching language Pascal didn't offer) and Ada might be more
popular today (popular as it may be in some areas, I haven't seen
much use for my modest knowledge of Ada except to speed learning
of Oracle PL/SQL).

But the Reagan administration also put a lot of money into the
military, which must have included Ada (what were they planning
to program the Strategic Defense Initiative in?), and my impression
of the history of GNAT is that the government funded the initial
GPLed Ada compiler (GNAT or the GNAT precursor?), as a conscious
choice to make an Ada compiler freely available.  Is this an accurate
understanding of the lobbying and support from Chris Anderson you
refer to?

--
MJSR



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