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

[zeller@ips.cs.tu-bs.de (Andreas Zeller)]

Richard Riehle (rriehle@nunic.nu.edu) wrote:

>   Java's democratic nature is a blessing for open exhange of ideas. It
>   would not lend itself easily to the protection of ideas.  When we want
>   to minimize the risk of sacrificing our intellectual property through
>   too easy public access, nothing does the job as well as Ada.

I don't get the point in here.  If I have some compiled code, where's
the difference in whether the source code was written in Java or Ada?
If I have some bytecode for the Java virtual machine, couldn't it have
been produced by some Ada compiler as well?

Although there are many Java interpreters and Ada compilers, neither
the Java language nor the Ada language impose a particular model of
program execution (compiler, interpreter, distribution, etc.)

Saying that one language has a greater risk in disclosing intellectual
property is just as misleading than saying that one language is more
efficient than another.  These are properties of the programming and
execution environment, not of the language itself.  I don't see why
choosing Ada or Java should make a difference here.

--
Andreas Zeller (zeller@acm.org)
Technische Universitaet Braunschweig, Germany