Re: How many different processors do you use?

[rawcswi@my-deja.com]

In article <7jon3l$ldg$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <7jol96$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.

What doesn't reflect reality?  You seem to have agreed with all
the individual statements above.  How can you know how much
the tastes of program managers at NSF or ARPA were influenced
by the political climate of the time?  Without certainty on that issue,
you can't say whether the Reagan administration's policies alone
had a positive or negative effect on promoting Ada within universities,
and I think that's enough to support a vague connection to reality.
(On the whole, I don't agree with muddy_buddy's claim, but I think
there's enough to justify requesting the additional information you
give below.)

> 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.

Well, the Reagan administration did have a substantial impact on
academic research funding; but I would have been surprised if
that had included military related research funding.  And if there
was reluctance to put the funding that did exist into Ada, then
the existence of additional funding might not have made much
difference.  But your comments above do support a claim that
the government failed to promote Ada adequately, outside of
universities, if even ARPA and NSF weren't enthusiastic about it.

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

A good conspiracy theory thrives on a vague connection to
reality; no connection or a firm connection would probably kill it.

> > 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.

I was a graduate student in CS through 1985; Ada was a prime
example for courses because it had a lot of interesting features,
but no compiler was available in our department at that time.
Would more money have made a free compiler available?  Would it
have made the department more inclined to commit to Ada as a
future teaching language when compilers would become available?
Maybe.  Your comments seem to indicate that the vision and will
to pursue such a strategy to promote Ada was more lacking than
the funding.

> > 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.

I don't believe I claimed to have any involvement.  (And there are
still aspects of Ada history that are hard to obtain information about
if you weren't involved (for example, details of the non-Green
languages), despite the impressive web resources for Ada.)

> > 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 :-)

(Not to pursue conspiracy theories too far, but the Reagan
administration's plan to compromise school lunch nutrition
by declaring ketchup a vegetable might have made colds
more common; his administration certainly pursued some policies
that had a negative impact on public health in general.)

Any federal spending or non-spending during the 80s must have
had some _vague_ relationship to the Reagan administration
(which would have had to, at some high level, approve such
spending).  But it is clear from your comments that the funding
available to promote Ada was not the major issue, and another
administration with less interest in military spending might have
been worse for Ada.

--
MJSR


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