Admiral Tuttle (Should be silent ad for Oracle)

Admiral Tuttle (Should be silent ad for Oracle)

[Colin James 0621]

  
The fact that David Guaspari does not post the source of the alleged
transcript is on its face subterfuge in my opinion.
  
The email path of the message is apparently from "oracorp.com", and
Oracle has a lot invested in parallel processing to speed up the
kludge performance of an interpreted query language.
  
If the message is authentic, then the chief scientist mentioned has
most certainly misinformed the Admiral.  What is said about Ada-9X
features of C++ or C on multiple processors is mistaken.
The extent of the misinformation about C++, for example, has now
infiltrated AT&T's C courses where it is now taught that C++ IS a
compiler (it's a precompiler that churns out C code with no regard
to the C compiler backend) and that C++ makes faster running code
than C (it does not because anything done in C++ can be programmed
to run faster in C).  Also the inference that the Ada Mandate is to
be abolished or lifted is not in keeping with other higher brass at
the Pentagon.  Ask Ralph Crafts about that one (no flames Greg).

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No disclaimer required, as Internet
is the loco parentis of all opinions.
  
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Re: Admiral Tuttle (Should be silent ad for Oracle)

[magnesium.club.cc.cmu.edu!news.sei.cmu.edu!firth]

In article <9307090525.aa28379@dsc.blm.gov> cjames@DSC.BLM.GOV (Colin James 062
1) writes:

>The email path of the message is apparently from "oracorp.com", and
>Oracle has a lot invested in parallel processing to speed up the
>kludge performance of an interpreted query language.

That sounds very odd to me.  In my experience, which is not all that
limited, the critical performance bottleneck in any information system
is the speed with which objects on mass storage can be accessed, which
is almost entirely an I/O peoblem and to a small extent an indexing
problem.  And if the issue is the performance of queries, the one
optimisation that dominates all the others is the reorganisation of
the relational primitives to minimise the size of the intermediate
retrieved sets of tuples (eg apply the better filters first).

Neither of these has much to do with parallel processing - indeed,
without serious investment in heavily multiported mass storage
devices, I'd expect parallel processors to degrade performance, because
of collisions in the device controllers and a reduced ability to schedule
I/O requests to minimise latency.

Does anyone have some hard facts about this issue?

Re: Admiral Tuttle (Should be silent ad for Oracle)

[agate!howland.reston.ans.net!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu]

In <9307090525.aa28379@dsc.blm.gov> cjames@DSC.BLM.GOV (Colin James 0621) write
s:


>  
>The fact that David Guaspari does not post the source of the alleged
>transcript is on its face subterfuge in my opinion.
>  
>The email path of the message is apparently from "oracorp.com", and
>Oracle has a lot invested in parallel processing to speed up the
>kludge performance of an interpreted query language.
>  
>If the message is authentic, then the chief scientist mentioned has
>most certainly misinformed the Admiral.  What is said about Ada-9X
>features of C++ or C on multiple processors is mistaken.
>The extent of the misinformation about C++, for example, has now
>infiltrated AT&T's C courses where it is now taught that C++ IS a
>compiler (it's a precompiler that churns out C code with no regard
>to the C compiler backend) 

Uh, define 'compiler' for me?  By this definition, a lot of the old C
compilers aren't compilers, either.  They're 'pre-assemblers' that
ch8rn out assembly code with no regard to the assembler backend.

>and that C++ makes faster running code
>than C (it does not because anything done in C++ can be programmed
>to run faster in C).  

I'd want to see the original statement on this one.  It sounds rather
fishy on its face, which leaves me wondering in just what context it
got said.

>Also the inference that the Ada Mandate is to
>be abolished or lifted is not in keeping with other higher brass at
>the Pentagon.  Ask Ralph Crafts about that one (no flames Greg).

Pity (IMHO).

-- 
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
 in the real world."   -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fred.McCall@dseg.ti.com - I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.

Re: Admiral Tuttle (Should be silent ad for Oracle)

[Mark C. Carroll]

In article <9307090525.aa28379@dsc.blm.gov> cjames@DSC.BLM.GOV (Colin James 062
1) writes:
>The extent of the misinformation about C++, for example, has now
>infiltrated AT&T's C courses where it is now taught that C++ IS a
>compiler (it's a precompiler that churns out C code with no regard
>to the C compiler backend) and that C++ makes faster running code
>than C (it does not because anything done in C++ can be programmed
>to run faster in C).

Sorry. I couldn't let this foolishness go unanswered.

C++ _is_ a full compiler. You're defining compiler in an obfuscatory
way... C++ is a compiler that uses C as a portable assembly language
for code generation. It's no less a compiler than anything else; it
does a lot more than simple preprocessing: full semantic analysis and
optimization. Further, many of the  commercial C++ compilers have
gone ahead and used assembly as the target language.

Further: C++ _can_ generate faster code than C. The C++ language
provides stronger typing, which allows the optimizer to determine more
information about the code, which can be used in optimization to
generate better code.

Finally: the statement that "anything done in C++ can be programmed
faster in C" is utter foolishness. Anything that can be done in C can
be done in exactly the same way in C++, with the compiler generating
the exact same target code.

If you want to criticize C++, there are a LOT of terrific reasons to
criticize it. If you want to claim that Ada is a better language than
C++, you can certainly back that claim up with a lot of
evidence. There's no need to resort to this kind of foolishness,
making stupid, false claims against C++ to back up your opinion.


-- 
|| Mark Craig Carroll: <MC>     ||"We the people are getting tired of your lies
|| CIS Grad, Univ of Delaware   || We the people now believe that it's time
|| PGP key available by finger  || We're demanding our rights to the answers
|| carroll@udel.edu             || We elect a precedent to state of mind"-Fish