From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_DATE autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,b19fa62fdce575f9 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1994-12-16 21:23:19 PST Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Path: bga.com!news.sprintlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!darkstar.UCSC.EDU!news.hal.COM!decwrl!netcomsv!netcomsv!telesoft!kst From: kst@alsys.com (Keith Thompson) Subject: Re: Array mappings Message-ID: Originator: kst@pulsar Sender: news@alsys.com (USENET News Admin @flash) Organization: Alsys, San Diego, CA, USA References: <9412061309.AA02026@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu> <3c4g1u$uh6@watnews1.watson.ibm.com> <3cd4ju$11h@felix.seas.gwu.edu> <3ckd14$1cqf@watnews1.watson.ibm.com> <3csnqi$3ee@felix.seas.gwu.edu> Date: Sat, 17 Dec 1994 00:43:01 GMT Date: 1994-12-17T00:43:01+00:00 List-Id: In <3csnqi$3ee@felix.seas.gwu.edu> mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) writes: > Sigh...and, as far as I know, nobody took the bait and made an > implementation- dependent pragma to do Fortran-friendly arrays. > > I'm still rockin' on my hobbyhorse, waiting for some Ada company > to say "Mike, we really talked to a good sample of all those > engineers out there beyond DoD, and concluded that this feature > was not worth the investment." I don't know whether or not the marketing department of any Ada company did this; I'm just a programmer. However, how sure are you that it *would* have been worth the investment? Can you produce a Fortran-using engineer who rejected Ada 83, but would have used it if it had supported Fortan-friendly arrays? You've said in the past that many engineers rejected PL/I because it doesn't support Fortran-style arrays, but several postings in this newsgroup indicate that it does. In particular, Robert Dewar wrote: > Michael, I think you are confused about ISUB, and barking up a wrong tree > to say that Ada 9X is superior to PL/1 here. ISUB is a much more powerful > feature than pragma Convention Fortran in Ada 9X, and subsumes it. I can easily imagine an Ada 83 compiler vendor adding an implementation-defined pragma similar to Ada 95's pragma Convention(Fortran) and *still* not being able to sell to all those engineers hooked on Fortran. Perhaps there was a marketing failure for both PL/I and Ada, but it's not as simple a failure as the one you portray. If you have any ideas on how to sell Ada to Fortran users, I'll be happy to forward them to our marketing department. -- Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) kst@alsys.com TeleSoft^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Alsys, Inc. 10251 Vista Sorrento Parkway, Suite 300, San Diego, CA, USA, 92121-2718 When you're a nail, every problem looks like a hammer.