Re: How many different processors do you use?

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

In article <7jol96$kji$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  rawcswi@my-deja.com wrote:
> 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 this simply does not reflect reality. Yes, it is true that
the NSF was reluctant to support Ada research in universities,
but as anyone around at the time knows, that had NOTHING AT ALL
to do with the Reagen administration, it was simply a reflection
of tastes of the program managers at NSF. ARPA was also not
particularly enthusiastic about Ada support, again, not lack of
resources, but lack of interest on the part of the program
managers. I visited ARPA a number of times to lobby for support
for a freely available Ada compiler, but without success. Note
that it was a HECK of a fight to make the Ada/Ed sources freely
available, but again that had NOTHING AT ALL to do with the
Reagen administration.

(it is easy to see how conspiracy theories get started :-)

> 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?)

Yes, and the DoD via the AJPO actually provided substantial
funds to encourage the use of Ada in universities. I doubt
in fact that lack of money was a real issue. It is generally
rather difficult to get funds for supporting development of
new courses in universities, but it was relatively easy to
do so for development of Ada related courses, and indeed Ada
had and continues to have some success as a language used to
teach computing in universities.

> and my impression
> of the history of GNAT is that the government funded the
> initia GPLed Ada compiler (GNAT or the GNAT precursor?), as a
> conscious choice to make an Ada compiler freely available.

Well I guess that does show that you were not intimately
involved with the details of the history here if that is
only an "impression". Yes, indeed, the GNAT project was funded
(at about the 3 million dollar level over four years) by the
DoD.

> Is
> this an accurate
> understanding of the lobbying and support from Chris Anderson
> you refer to?

Chris Anderson, as Ada 9X Project Director, was the contract
administrator for this contract. She found the funding, and she
was the one who pushed the contract through, and also provided
us support at all levels (in particular, she also fought to
defend the project against very fierce attacks from some of the
commercial Ada vendors who tried to have the project killed).

I think there is no question that a GNAT-like product for Ada 83
would have been a big help. It did not happen for many reasons,
none of which are even vaguely related to the Reagen
administration (goodness, next you will be blaming the
man for the common cold :-)


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