Re: Ada and Automotive Industry

[jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony)]

In article <b197cc$a61a.14a@marius> ken@nrtt.demon.co.uk (Ken Tindell) writes:

> In article <dewar.848760148@merv>
> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) wrote:
> > Well I do not think you know enough about GCC or GNAT for your skeptical
> > viewpoint to be significant. I still have seen no one make a cogent
> > technical argument that supports this viewpoint. Ken says that it
> > must be impossible because he saw one half baked poor attempt, you
> > sayt that you are skeptical without even that much to back up your
> > skepticism.
> 
> I should be very careful about calling people's software half-baked
> merely because it doesn't perform very well. A case of one kitchen
> utensil calling another "black"...

Well, I _SERIOUSLY_ doubt this.  Who was this "other people"???


> > As to the huge market opportunity, I do not see it at all. You cannot
> > guage a particular Ada market by counting the number of processors sold,
> 
> If I recall the start of this, some people from the Ada community
> were suggesting that the automotive industry all adopt Ada for their
> hardware. Now the argument appears to be that the automotive industry
> shouldn't use Ada because there aren't going to be any compilers...

Part of the problem here is that you don't appear to be able to
_read_.  The point being made by RD and others is not that the auto
industry shouldn't use Ada because there aren't going to be compilers
(after all there are some) but rather the compiler vendors should
not/cannot care much about the auto industry because there will not be
much different projects there to make enough sales of compilers to
make it worth the effort to pursue them.  I'm not sure if this is true
or not.

Whether the auto industry _should_ use Ada is an entirely different
proposition all together.  Someone thought they could make good use of
Ada for their "real time work".  I tend to agree with this (having
done some work at GM labs on a research project for building a IDE for
such work).  But trying to convince them of this is pointless and not
worth the effort in any case.  There really just isn't enough work
there to worry about it one way or the other.

/Jon

-- 
Jon Anthony
Organon Motives, Inc.
Belmont, MA 02178
617.484.3383
jsa@organon.com