Re: "C" vrs ADA

[henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)]

Sigh.  Was it really necessary to post 80+ lines of speculation and
misinformation?  There was no "A" language; "B" was named after BCPL.
Unix was developed by *two* people, not one:  Ken Thompson and Dennis
Ritchie.  The PDP-7 was not a microcomputer.  C evolved mostly after
Unix moved to the PDP-11 (which wasn't a microcomputer either -- the
word didn't even exist then).  The C Shell came later and was modeled
on C, not vice-versa.  C has spread far beyond Unix, with good reason.
Unix is *not* inherently poor at real-time applications (although this
is a common misconception, and it's true that custom-designed real-time
systems do better).  Many real-time systems are written in C nowadays,
since it works just fine without Unix underneath.  Ada was (officially,
at least) motivated almost entirely by the language diversity problem,
since it has little or nothing to do with the lack of a non-proprietary
real-time operating system.  The attempt to standardize things like the
Ada development environments came later, not first.  Ada was chosen as a
language name not because she was Babbage's mistress (she wasn't), but
because in certain ways she was the world's first programmer.  Babbage
invented (again, in certain ways) the computer, and did not invent the
punchcard-controlled loom.

Two things were correct:  Ada (which is not an acronym and should not be
written in capital letters) is important to government contractors because
DoD is jamming it down peoples' throats, and its future elsewhere is not
yet clear.
-- 
Apollo was the doorway to the stars. |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
Next time, we should open it.        | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry