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From: eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)
Subject: Re: Any research putting c above ada?
Date: 1997/04/30
Message-ID: <EACHUS.97Apr30120129@spectre.mitre.org>#1/1
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References: <335F9D0E.41C67EA6@cacd.rockwell.com>
 <5jqvbj$bd9@mtinsc05.worldnet.att.net> <JSA.97Apr28190941@alexandria>
 <E9F3CF.2KK@research.att.com>
Organization: The Mitre Corp., Bedford, MA.
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-04-30T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <E9F3CF.2KK@research.att.com> ark@research.att.com (Andrew Koenig) writes:

  > OK ... suppose you're in the DoD and you're in charge of setting
  > down preliminary requirements for a DoD standard programming language.
  > If a language already exists that will meet those requirements, the
  > DoD will use it.  If no such language already exists, the DoD will
  > launch a huge project to create one and put you in charge of it.

  > Under such circumstances, wouldn't you do whatever it took to be sure
  > that no existing language could meet the requirements?  If not, you
  > would probably not have reached a level in the hierarchy that would
  > have allowed you to influence the decision in the first place.

  > The nature of the decision process GUARANTEED that no existing
  > language would qualify.  Therefore, no inference can legitimately
  > be drawn from the nonqualification of any existing language.

    Nonsense!  This totally misstates the situation.  Let us assume
for the moment that Eiffel existed in 1977 and did meet all or most of
the DoD's needs.  The HOLWG would have said, hey great, now we can
start on the real work of providing tools and a development
environment for Eiffel to do all the things we really want to do.

    In fact, members of the HOLWG have stated publicly that one 
mistake of the HOLWG was doing the language requirements and
development environment requirements in the wrong order.

    The HOLWG had no vested interest in language developments.  If
they had, they probably would have decided that several languages was
a better solution than just one.


--

					Robert I. Eachus

with Standard_Disclaimer;
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