Re: The Battle of the Cultures

[world!srctran@decwrl.dec.com (Gregory Aharonian)]

>If a near-equivalent library were included with the Ada compiler,
>I wouldn't ever have considered the Think Pascal/C family.
>For my personal use, it isn't "culture" but tool availability and
>maturity which determines my choice of language.
>
>Whether this has anything to do with Mandates or not, I couldn't say. :-)
>
>Terry J. Westley, Principal Computer Scientist
>Calspan Corporation, P.O. Box 400, Buffalo, NY 14225

   I'll say it since I am tiresome bore.  The Ada Mandate shelters
the Ada vendors from competition, diminishing the market and driving
up compiler prices, driving down users.  With such a small potential
market, it is uneconomical for anyone to produce Ada bindings for
all of the software technology that you can access through C.  It's
also uneconomical to produce pure Ada libraries - the market is so
small you will never recoup your investment, especially selling to
defense contractors who hate buying software technology.
    If only the comrades setting Ada policy paid attention to these
important free market principles, Ada might be able to be revived from
its coma.

Greg Aharonian
" .  ... .. . .   .... "
-- 
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 Greg Aharonian
 Source Translation & Optimization
 P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178