Turbo Ada

[cjames@DSC.BLM.GOV (Colin James 0621)]

Ben Elliston writes "Borland wrote Turbo Ada".

In 1991 I checked this good idea out.  According to the folks at JPI (Jensen
Partners Intl -- founded by Niels Jensen, co-founder of Borland with Kahn)
before JPI was taken over by Claris, Borland had a "secret" Turbo Ada project.
But it never matured (IMHO due to Ada compilers being written to standards,
whereas C compilers are usually copied from others without standards), and
when Jensen departed with most of Borland's non-BASIC technology it was
Modula-2 and Pascal (later C and C++) which were more marketable both in
Europe (they were headquarted in England) and USA.

As a govt programmer forced to write code in Oracle and C (aka programming
hell), I can understand the marketeering rationale (bad pun Grady) behind
the JPI/Borland folks.  If you can sell more compilers in programming
language FOO, then do that.  In fact, the highest quality C compilers now
are for PCs.  For example, try calling a void function_test as
"function_test", rather than "function_test ( )".  The Prime C compiler
and the Sun ANSII C compiler both compile "function_test", then at run-
time simply skip over the line.  But the PC compilers flag the error and
tell you "which function or if a variable, not found".

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Colin James, BLM, SC-342D, Bldg 50, DFC, Lakewood, CO  80225
Voice: (303) 236 - 5897
Internet:  cjames.dsc.blm.gov

"I ain't often right, but I've never been wrong, it never turns out the
way it does in the song..."
  --Scarlet Begonia by Robert Hunter, songwriter for The Grateful Dead

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