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From: jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony)
Subject: Re: CRC in Ada?
Date: 1997/03/14
Message-ID: <JSA.97Mar14161230@alexandria>#1/1
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Distribution: world
References: <5g98ai$gqi@news2.delphi.com>
Organization: PSI Public Usenet Link
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-03-14T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <5g98ai$gqi@news2.delphi.com> tmoran@bix.com writes:


> calls) are less portable.  It's hard to argue strongly for Ada while
> also saying "except for the parts Ada can't do well" (even if that

I know what you are trying to get at here.  But the odd thing is, this
sort of thing is true of anything (in this context: PL), so why isn't
it hard to argue for, say, C while also saying "except for the parts C
can't do well".  Like nearly _all_ the aspects of any major piece of
software - not some of the low level bit twiddly stuff on some
platforms.


> translated a small program from C to Ada and found it ten times
> slower.  I don't know what happened in that particular case, but often
> that sort of thing results not in investigation of how to get around
> the weak points of the Ada compiler/library, but rather in non-use of
> Ada because "Ada is ten times slower".

Yes, that's the sort of myopia that does abound.  But, why only here?
After all, there are a lot of stories that I know of personally where
the gist is something like: "Yeah, we used C for this large piece of
work which needed to run on many platforms.  We had tons of your
typical SIGSEGV problems and memory leaks up the wazoo. And to make
the code portable we had a nightmare with all the #ifdefs in the
source.  But we basically got it done and now we're looking at doing
something similar for this other project."

Why wasn't the reaction, "This experience has led us to reject out of
hand the use of C again for nearly all the major work on this new
project.  Certain bits will be more appropriate in C, but most of it
will be in X.  Quite frankly, the idea of using C here would make us
all want to head for the hills as fast as possible."

>   There should be *very* few cases where C is the more appropriate
> language.

There *are* very few *places* (areas, kind of work, what-have-you)
where C is the more appropriate language.

/Jon

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