Re: Ada's (in)visibility in the engineering community

[emery@mitre-bedford.arpa (David Emery)]

>Now that that has been addressed, my original point is that C and (by
>inheritance) C++ are commercial real-time successes.  If you doubt this
>statement, then tell me, why are you not reading this message on a computer
>whose operating system was written in Ada.  While I am not a great fan of
>U*X itself, you are more likely than not, reading this message on a U*X
>system.

The "conventional" meaning of real-time is a system that must respond
to external events within (usually restrictive) timing constraints.
My workstation and text editor are not real-time in this sense,
because the only thing that happens when I don't get an adequate
response is that I get mad.  Nothing goes boom or falls out of the
sky. 

This is not true of things like flight simulators and airplanes,
themselves.  Although most of the commercial real-time operating
systems (e.g. Lynx) are written in C or assembler, there is a large
body of real-time embedded code that is written in Ada, operating
system and all.  Boeing has many commercial examples that fly now.

Furthermore, the BiiN operating system (which provided a System V
interface) was itself written in Ada, with a C binding!  (It is fair
to note that BiiN was not sucessful, but my observation was that Ada
was not the cause of the problem.  The problem with BiiN was lack of
marketing.  Now, 5 years after its death, I'd still like to have a
system with the functionality of the BiiN system, particularly its
network object orientation.)

				dave