From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: 7 Jun 93 15:38:18 GMT From: agate!howland.reston.ans.net!noc.near.net!inmet!spock!stt@ucbvax.Berkeley .EDU (Tucker Taft) Subject: Re: Non-defense Ada applications - answering several requests Message-ID: List-Id: In article srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) writes: >Mike, > Each time you post this, I keep on thinking "Yea, well mine's >longer". If I posted a list of similar C/C++ projects, it would be >50 times larger for projects with a similar range of sizes. Actually, I think it would be doing the public a service if someone would publish a similar list, but restrict it to C++. My suspicion is that if one looks at large, long-lived, reliable systems, one will find that Ada is being chosen for such systems at least as often as other languages. Almost all air-traffic control systems are being implemented in Ada these days. Certainly a lot of telecommunications is in C/C++, largely because of the historical dominance of AT&T and Unix in that realm, but even in telecommunications Ada is being chosen (e.g. by NTT in Japan). The fact is that when reliability, maintainability, and overall quality are prime factors, companies are less swayed by how inexpensive are the PC compilers for a given language. It would certainly be great if Ada compilers were less expensive, but in a large, long-lived system, the cost of the compilers is dwarfed by the cost of development and maintenance. I suspect that if someone tries to put together a list of large, long-lived, reliable systems being built in C++, (s)he will find it is hard to produce a list much longer than the correponding Ada list, for much the same reasons -- there aren't that many such systems around, many companies keep these things to themselves, and older languages like Fortran, Cobol, and assembly language are still being heavily used. It would be useful to see such a list because it will help people make more objective assessments of which language to choose when facing the development of similar systems. The major goal of Ada relative to other languages is the production of reliable systems, and so any information on the development of reliable systems in any language would be very appropriate for posting to comp.lang.ada. S. Tucker Taft stt@inmet.com Intermetrics, Inc. Cambridge, MA 02138