Re: Ada - buzzword or not? (Was: Ada-Europe 2007 early registration deadline approaching)

[Chris Hills <chris@phaedsys.org>]

In article <466415b3$0$8389$39db0f71@news.song.fi>, Niklas Holsti 
<niklas.holsti@nospam.please> writes
>Chris Hills wrote:
>
>> I think Ada is less popular than it was (a statement of numerical 
>>fact not a comment on the language itself) other languages are used 
>>more often. However Ada still has a very large part of the safety 
>>critical market.  Some areas would use nothing else.
>>  Pascal and Modular 2 are all but defunct.  There are too many 
>>companies  with a vested interest in Ada to let it go quietly.
>
>Not only companies -- there are many individuals who use it by 
>preference (I am one of these) and who maintain its implementations, 
>for example the GCC/GNAT compiler on various Linux distros (alas I am 
>not one of these).

Individuals are irrelevant. There are still individuals using forth, 
oberon, pascal,  modula3, small talk and many other languages.  It needs 
the companies to produce industrial strength tools and companies ot 
specify the use of the language on major projects.


>I would describe Ada as an industrial strength implementation of the 
>ideas in Pascal, Modula 2 and CLU, with a strong guiding philosophy but 
>enough pragmatics to make implementations practical and efficient.

Sounds reasonable to me.

> The Ada WikiBook http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:Ada is a 
>good introduction to the language.
>

-- 
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\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills  Staffs  England     /\/\/\/\/
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