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From: eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)
Subject: Re: Choosing C++ instead of Ada (was What is Ada used for?)
Date: 1996/10/25
Message-ID: <EACHUS.96Oct24202615@spectre.mitre.org>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 191850195
references: <AE813FAA-56A9E@206.107.67.23>
organization: The Mitre Corp., Bedford, MA.
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-10-25T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <54gc04$osv@uuneo.neosoft.com> rlove@neosoft.com (Robert B. Love ) writes:

  > Where are the success stories for C++ in large DoD efforts?  Since
  > I don't do C++ I don't see them.  Are there any?  We know of Ada
  > success stories.

    I don't know of any, but I know of some failures. I know of some
VERY successful large projects in Ada, and successful large projects
in C, COBOL (various versions), FORTRAN 66 and 77, Jovial J3, Jovial
J73, CMS-2Y, Lisp, Scheme, and Smalltalk.  Note that successful
projects are more likely than failures to be multilingual.  In fact
the most successful combination seems to be Ada with some C.  But no
successful DoD program that I know of has used a significant amount of
C++.  Fortunately, the failure of C++ systems seems to come before or
during integration, not after deployment.

    I can't speak for MITRE, or even for all DoD software projects
that MITRE has a finger in supporting, but that should be a very
troubling statement to those advocating use of C++ on defense systems.

    By the way, C is not the enemy, and even C++ is not the enemy.
The enemy is the ignorance of software engineering that we see every
day.  If the best language for the job was always chosen, our taxes
would be lower.  (And Ada would be used a lot more often. ;-)



--

					Robert I. Eachus

with Standard_Disclaimer;
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