Re: Customer balks at Ada -- any hope?

[nabbasi@pacbell.net.NOSPAM]

In article <3974D54B.3D2449FD@silver.jhuapl.edu>, Scott says...
 
>from my perspective as an electronic technician that maintaining an
>embedded system in Ada (which is one of my jobs) is much easier than
>maintaining a system of equal complexity in C (also one of my jobs.)

I think maintaining a large program in Ada is much easier than in any
other language. Ada was designed from the ground up with constructs
to support this. Real Packages, the Ada central library concept, 
separate compilation, the fact that it is impossible to build an 
inconsistant program in Ada (whose parts are out of date with other parts), 
strong typing, etc.. 

I download Ada code written more than 10 years ago, and it will just compile
with no errors or warnings. Try that with C or C++ or Java. 
 
The more I work in the software industry, the more I am amazed on how
much time is wasted by not using the better tool for the job. 
 
As others said, any programmer worth half his salary should be able to 
learn Ada in few days, and become good enough at it in few short weeks.

As far as Ada going away, this is IMPOSSIBLE. Gnat source code is
out, and unless all the hard drives in the world that have a copy
of the gnat source code suddenlly all break down at the same time,
it is a physical impossiblity for Ada to go away, such as it is a
physical imossibility for gcc and all the gnu tools to go away. If you
have the source code, it will always be here.  Having the source
code is the most security you can evern have.

Can you say the same about your VC++ code? What if MS tommorrow decided
to stop VC++, how will you compile your VC++ programs on tommrrow's
machines that have no VC++ compiler on them?  You do not have the source
code for VC++, so you are stuck.  This will never happen with Ada/Gnat.
MS is now killing J++, now what will happen to all that J++ code? 

Nasser