Re: Using Ada for device drivers? (Was: the Ada mandate, and why it collapsed and died)

[softeng3456@netscape.net (soft-eng)]

jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net (Jim Rogers) wrote in message news:<82347202.0305021418.4719da45@posting.google.com>...

> How do you determine the success or failure of a language?
> Did Cobol succeed or fail?
> Did Fortran succeed or fail?
> Did Bourne Shell succeed or fail?
> How about Common Lisp, smalltalk, or eiffel?

I suppose you could define success as "having a name
that starts and ends with the letter a" and then claim
Ada as being wildly successful.

However, by more objective criteria, the language
failed to meet most of its expectations.  It was
expected to be used primarily in ALL government
work within a few years, and there was a general
expectation that it will also become very
popular outside the government.  (Sorry, not
going to define "general", "expectation", "will",
"government"...)

> Are you saying that high level features are good but only if
> the language has very few of them?
> 
> What is the opitimal number? How is that number determined?

Ah, we need more strict definitions!  Sorry, this is common
sense.  If you take sugar in your coffee,
too little is going to taste bad and so is too much.
Exact counting of granules is not necessary or relevant.
(Though maybe someone could do a study on ranges
where a language might become "feature-heavy", but
it's very difficult, because first you have to rank
features and separate "deep concept"s from "itsy-bitsy-feature"s,
from "nice-to-have-feature"s and so on...)

> > > Absolutely wrong. Ada did not extend Pascal. It simply belongs to
> > > the same syntax family, which is not rooted in Pascal. Algol came
> > > long before Pascal.
> > 
> > I suppose you could make that point theoretically.  But
> > at the time Ada came out, Pascal was very popular.
> 
> What has popularity got to do with truth?

Simply that Ada designers were much more likely to have
been exposed in depth to Pascal, than to the "Algol family tree".

> By the way, did Pascal succeed or fail?

Depends upon your definitions, but by normal definitions
it was very successful until early 80s, then was
replaced as C became very successful.

> Gee. That sounds a lot like the way Ada was developed.
> The ideas and accomplishments of many languages were considered
> during the development of the language. By your definition, Ada
> was an evolutionary development.

No, you need to learn the history of Ada.
Ada was not a slow natural development.  It was artificially
developed at the behest of, and following the requirements of,
the DoD.

> So, did the type system succeed or fail? Did it succeed because
> it was broken? Will C enjoy greater success with a fixed type
> system?

C type-sytem was more useful, and that's why C succeeded and
replaced Pascal even though Pascal had a strict and
theoretically better (according to some definitions)
type system.

> So unnatural development would be the invention of something
> completely new. Interesting. Would that require some form of
> devine intervention?
> How would you describe the invention of the punch cards used in
> the Jacquard loom? Would that be natural or not? Does "natural
> development" imply a virtue not found in other kinds of 
> development?

I think there was an actual point I made.
Witticisms are nice, but sound even better if you
understand and actually refute the point wittily.