Re: Array mappings

[re@waporo.muc.de (Rolf Ebert)]

>>>>> "Keith" == Keith Thompson <kst@alsys.com> writes:

Keith> In <3csnqi$3ee@felix.seas.gwu.edu> mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu
Keith> (Michael Feldman) writes:
>> Sigh...and, as far as I know, nobody took the bait and made an
>> implementation- dependent pragma to do Fortran-friendly arrays.
>> 
>> I'm still rockin' on my hobbyhorse, waiting for some Ada company
>> to say "Mike, we really talked to a good sample of all those
>> engineers out there beyond DoD, and concluded that this feature
>> was not worth the investment."

Keith> I don't know whether or not the marketing department of any
Keith> Ada company did this; I'm just a programmer.  However, how
Keith> sure are you that it *would* have been worth the investment?
Keith> Can you produce a Fortran-using engineer who rejected Ada 83,
Keith> but would have used it if it had supported Fortan-friendly
Keith> arrays?

When I started to work in a thermal engineering lab about 5 years ago,
we all decided to use Ada for our every day programming and for the one
big simulation project.  Most of the engineers only had Fortran
experience and had already a lot of code that we wanted reuse by
interfacing from Ada.

Fortran friendly arrays would have been a big advantage, but Ada failed
for other reasons, too. Some problems were calculating exp(2x) instead
of exp(x) (we lost a whole week on this),  not correctly passsing
parameters from the 7th parameter on, etc... Yes, I know these are
compiler issues, but Ada was blamed for it.

Today nobody uses Ada anymore in this lab.  They all turned back to
Fortran and C.

Keith> -- Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) kst@alsys.com
Keith> TeleSoft^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Alsys, Inc.  10251 Vista Sorrento
Keith> Parkway, Suite 300, San Diego, CA, USA, 92121-2718 When
Keith> you're a nail, every problem looks like a hammer.


	Rolf
--
Rolf Ebert                      Beratung fuer Energiesysteme und Informatik
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