Re: Ada News Brief - 96-05-24.txt [1/1]

[stt@henning.camb.inmet.com (Tucker Taft)]

AdaIC (adainfo@sw-eng.falls-church.va.us) wrote:
: Ada News Brief
: Week Ending: May 24, 1996

: ... Tucker Taft, chief scientist of Intermetrics, Inc., 
: stated, "Of course they would love to see Java as the next 
: Ada in DoD. It's a lot of hype. 
              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^  This is either a misquote,
or taken out of context.  I am a fan of Java, and I don't think it
is just a lot of hype.

Be that as it may, I do believe Ada has a number of 
advantages, particularly with respect to the thoroughness 
of the compile-time checking provided by Ada (e.g.  strong type 
distinctions between numeric types, enumeration types, array types, 
etc.).  For example, Java treats all "int"s as freely interconvertible,
and has no separate concept of an enumeration type.  This means that a
Java interface communicates less information than an Ada interface, both
to the reader, and to the compiler.

The great thing about the Ada/Java combination is that we get the
best of both worlds, getting the robust consistency checking, generic 
templates, enumeration types, etc., from the Ada side, while also 
getting garbage collection, dynamic linking, Web-browser integration, etc.
from the Java side.

-Tucker Taft   stt@inmet.com   http://www.inmet.com/~stt/
Intermetrics, Inc.  Cambridge, MA  USA