Re: Advice on selling Ada to a C shop

[Warren <ve3wwg@gmail.com>]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1381 bytes --]

Marco expounded in news:aedaa685-813d-4f46-8ad3-
3a42affa14df@q12g2000yqj.googlegroups.com:

> On Jun 21, 7:23�am, Warren <ve3...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> But I think one practical selling point, to achieve a
>> "comfort level", is to show them examples of how Ada can
>> interface with C. �This way, whether they actually
>> need to call C routines or not, they will have the comfort
>> of knowing that they can, with little difficulty.
> 
> Hopefully this won't sound like heresy to Ada folks.
> 
>  May I suggest you start your design in Ada. Start with Ada as the
> programming-in-the-large model and show how you can easily reuse
> existing C functions when necessary or have some components developed
> in C for those not willing to learn a new language.
> 
> Finding inexpensive Ada combined with C cross-compilers for certain
> CPU targets may be an issue.

It's not just that, but in a given company, where many
similar projects are done, you may have large bodies
of existing library code. It's a tough sell to say
"rewrite _everything_ in Ada". 

Conversely, it's much easier to sell "reuse what we 
don't want to rewrite at the moment, but let's write 
the new 'stuff' in Ada". Once everyone get's hooked
on that, then other portions can be migrated to Ada
over time.

With this approach, you can avoid the "aw, it's 
just too much work(/cost)" objection.

Warren