Re: Java vs Ada 95 (Was Re: Once again, Ada absent from DoD SBIR solicitation)

[jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony)]

In article <dewar.845340573@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

> Jon Anthony said
> 
> "I've seen you mention this before.  It is depressing.  Putting it in
> an annex of its own would probably have been even nicer (and from what
> you say, even less likely).  Really.  This is a pretty sad and
> incomprehensible story."
> 
> 
> Not incomprehensible at all, it just means the world does not agree with
> you, or at least the world of people involved and interested in the Ada
> 95 design. When I argue for something, and everyone else disagrees, I
> don't go around mumbling "sad and incomprehensible", I just figure I
> was wrong!

Well, if you can show me that I really am wrong about this, then I
will admit it.  I do not believe that "everyone else disagrees" with
this.  In fact, I would be surprised if most _potential_ users agreed
with me.  Just because many (maybe even most) of the old users did not
think GC useful, does not in any way suggest that the large untapped
pool of users out there looking for something better than C/C++ rubish
would not have jumped for it.  You are incorrectly generalizing from a
biased population.


> There could have been an annex for GC, but no one was interested enough
> to suggest that, and if they had, I don't think it would have interested
> people enough to survive.

As I suspected.


> Just because you want something in Ada and not many other people do does
> not mean the majority is wrong and you are right :-)

What "majority"?  A few dozen people on a design review who took their
only comments from an existing user base?  OK, maybe that's hyperbole
- but you have no sound basis on which to state "majority" here.

I see this may be a case where we are not seeing eye-to-eye :-)


> Now, as I have noted before, I think Java may change people's attitude
> towards GC (in fact I think this is really the only interesting thing
> about Java that is really new).

Well, as far as that goes, Ada95 could have played this role or at
least have been right there with it.


> If you have a language like Algol-68 or (as far as I know, I am not
> an expert) Java, that has no way of explicitly freeing storage, then
> from a practical point of view, you have no way of implementing the
> language (assuming it does have dynmaic allocation explicitly or
> implicitly, without using garbage collection).

Sure you do - it will just be a lousy implementation.  Or maybe one
which is intended to never be used for any "real" applications.  Just
leak away.

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