RE: From extended Pascals to Ada 95 guide

["Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." <rleif@rleif.com>]

From: Bob Leif
To: Marin D. Condic et al.

You were correct concerning, "However, its hard to compete with something
like Microsoft Visual C++ for PC app development simply because of the body
of code leveraged through the MFC and the really spiffy, well integrated
IDE."

One simple solution is to use XML with the next version of Microsoft Visual
Studio and interface it with Ada. In fact the ARA should ask Microsoft for
permission to collaborate on creation of an interface for Ada to Visual
Studio. I suspect that since Microsoft makes money selling to the DoD,
Microsoft would accommodate the Ada community.

-----Original Message-----
From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org
[mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org]On Behalf Of Marin D. Condic
Sent: Friday, August 25, 2000 10:59 AM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: From extended Pascals to Ada 95 guide


Pat Rogers wrote:
> Some baggage never gets lost...
>
> This idea that development in Ada is more expensive than in other
> languages must be challenged whenever we come across it.  The tool
> costs can be very reasonable and in my experience (and others' as
> well) programmer productivity can be extremely high indeed.
>
I would agree, but with a qualification. In some domains with some
development environments, you get lots of prepackaged, well integrated
services. The language itself (Ada) is going to be faster/better/cheaper
to develop in than (say) C++ or some other popular languages because of
ease of understanding, extensive checking to avoid bugs, easier
debugging, easier configuration management, etc. However, its hard to
compete with something like Microsoft Visual C++ for PC app development
simply because of the body of code leveraged through the MFC and the
really spiffy, well integrated IDE. While similar tools are available
with Ada to some extent, you don't get the whole thing in one nice kit,
so you'll lose time in pulling the tools together, integrating them,
figuring out how to use them, etc. For some domains you may not have
these tools at all.

Granted, this is not a "language" issue, but more of a "development
environment" issue. Some other language may be faster to develop in
simply because of the availability of the whole environment - not
because of the language itself.


> All other things being equal, in a contest between highly-skilled Ada
> programmers and highly-skilled C programmers, I'll bet on the Ada
> people to produce the final code faster.
>
I'd bet the same way. There is a strong body of evidence to support
this. But the "All other things being equal" qualification is a big
issue.

MDC
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Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
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