Re: Trouble with UNIX IPC and Ada95

[dvdeug@x8b4e53cd.dhcp.okstate.edu (David Starner)]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2000 17:50:57 GMT, wv12@my-deja.com <wv12@my-deja.com> wrote:
>Apparently this is not the case. Twenty years after IBM launches the
>IBM PC, you see a myriads of operating systems written in C: MINIX,
>XINU, Linux, XENIX, FreeBSD, etc... I haven't seen anything in Ada
>on any PC that provides half the functionality of DOS. Maybe there
>is a language that makes OS design become a walk in the park. That
>language is not Ada.

Your logic is wrong: No major OS for the PC is written in Ada does
not imply anything about Ada's use for writting OS's. It just means
that Linus Torvald, UC-Berkeley and Microsoft chose to write their
operating systems in C and C++. Two main reasons are probably cultural
(Unix is traditionally written in C, and C was more popular) and 
resources (a free OS needs a free compiler, but GNAT didn't appear
until '94-'95).

Of course Ada doesn't make OS design a walk in the park. No language
that exists does, and any language that did would be like Lex -
a very narrow, specialized tool. OS design is naturally a highly
complex job, not a walk in the park.

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
http/ftp: dvdeug.net.dhis.org
It was starting to rain on the night that they cried forever,
It was blinding with snow on the night that they screamed goodbye.
	- Dio, "Rock and Roll Children"