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Date: 31 Aug 93 22:38:28 GMT
From: agate!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!darwin.sura.net!RBSE.M
ountain.Net!wvnvms.wvnet.edu!cerc.wvu.edu!vanscoy@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU  (Frances
 L VanScoy)
Subject: Re: Computational scientists ignoring and ignored by Ada
Message-ID: <CCnAw5.rt@cerc.wvu.edu>
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

I am a faculty member in computer science at West Virginia and a big
fan of Ada.  (I first taught a unit on Ada in a course in 1980,
taught Ada as a first programming language to freshmen in 1987, and
was the major advocate for my department's move to teach Ada to all
freshmen cs majors starting in fall 1989.)

Currently I am working with physics and engineering researchers
at WVU on a computational materials science project.  The university
has its own new (less than one year old) parallel computer.
I would *love* to develop new software for this project in Ada.
However we only have compilers for dialects of Fortran and C.
In discussions with many vendors of parallel computers before we
purchased ours I was disappointed to learn that Ada compilers for 
parallel computers are essentially nonexistant.  In three+ years on
this project I have often missed the protection of strong typing and
the support for abstraction provided by Ada.

We who have an appreciation for Ada and software engineering and
experience in scientific computing need to continue to encourage
parallel computer vendors and Ada compiler vendors to provide Ada
compilers for parallel computers.

Frances Van Scoy, Associate Professor of Computer Science
Dept. of Statistics and Computer Science, West Virginia University
Morgantown, WV  26506-6330      phone 304-293-3607   fax 304-293-2272