Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <93fd9v$s03$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <93f73f$mt1$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> >Do a little research here to find out just how amusing this
ignorance
> is!
>
> Well I followed your advice and found some reasons for my
ignorance,
> and guess we are far more than I thought in that case :-))
>
> For those people here is what I found
>
> - Jovial seems quite unknown outside embedded programing
> folks

That's right, definitely it was pretty much only used for
mission critical embedded projects (remember that this was the
primary original target for Ada, which is why JOVIAL is
relevant to the Ada world).

> - Quite a lot programmers (a mojority ?) including me weren't
> born at Jovial greatest time :-)

True, but very likely they were not around when the x86 was
invented either, and actually Jovial was still in active use
as recently as ten years ago (I think JUG was still meeting
that late -- surely someone here will fill in the date --
certainly I talked at a couple of JUG meetings). The fact
that something was important in the past should not act as
an absolutely barrier to you knowing something about it :-)

> - If you check http://www.xinotech.com/xino-jovial.html
> you'll find some reasons not to loose too much time about
> Jovial future and
> characteristics including :

Well no one actually claimed JOVIAL had a future, I used it
as an arbitrary example of a language that was at this stage
less succesful and less used than Ada. I chose this particular
example (among hundreds that I might have chosen) because I
assumed it would be familiar to Ada knowledgable folks :-)


Your quotes on emulation are a bit bizarre, because that
represents just one possibility. There are of course JOVIAL
applications running today, and being maintained today
on native hardware without emulation. Big legacy projects
can be around for a long long time. I don't know if any
company is providing maintenance on JOVIAL compilers today,
but it would not surprise me to find out that they were
(Averstar would be the most likely candidate if anyone
still is doing JOVIAL support).

Most certainly no one suggests running JOVIAL on PC's for
doing GUI fiddling :-)


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