Re: Open comment to Ted Holden

[cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!nstar!towers!grafted !dappel@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Dave Appel)]

news@fedfil.UUCP (news) writes:
> Several points:  The commercial software venders are now adhering
> to standards, the most serious from the perspective of languages 
> being C/C++.  The argument you give would pertain in a situation
> in which Borland, MicroSoft, Ashton-Tate et. al. were each hawking
> their very own language.  The reality is quite different.  The choice
> is between the standard North American programming language (C/C++)
> which everybody uses and which is well understood by most serious
> programmers, and the flakey piece of garbage known as Ada.
> 
> The problems mentioned in that large post of mine are real enough.  Some
> very bright people have been wasting their lives spending 12 hours working
> around Ada and one hour solving their own problem (to the extent
> possible WITH Ada)..
> 
> Virtually all really vital and serious military work is still being
> done in C and other languages with waivers.  There's a real reason
> for that.
> 
> Ted Holden
> -- 
> HTE
> bear

   I hate to burst your bubble Ted, but "everbody" doesn't
use C/C++.
    Most business systems (counting systems or packages, not
installations) are written in COBOL.  There is still more
lines of COBOL "in production" than any other language in
the business environment.
    Most scientific stuff is still in Fortran.  I did a survey
in comp.sys.super and by FAR the largest amount of production
code and by FAR the largest amount of development is in
Fortran when dealing with supercomputers.  I talked to people
involved in NCSA and they say Fortran is by far and away the
language of choice on supers.
 
Also, there is no "Standard C".   Ansi C and K&R C are *NOT*
"standards" that are adhered to.  Talk to the people at
Aldus corporation, the people who wrote PageMaker.  They
have PageMaker on the Mac and PageMaker on the PC.  Only 
about 80% of the code is identical between the two systems.
 
Graphic handling and system calls are still too different.
 
I went over this "C is not C all around the world" with a friend
of mine when we discussed writing a business program in C.
 
I wanted a C program that was portable to mini-computers and
workstations.  He wanted to write it in Borland C with
Borland's user interface package.   I can think of 3 
completely different versions of the package:
  1) character based version for minicomputer users running
      dumb terminals
  2) X-windows based version for workstations
  3) PC-based version with Brand-X user interace package.

--
Dave Appel
The Grafted Branch BBS
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