Re: Ada Dot Net ?

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

"William J. Thomas" <WJThomas@WCVT.COM> wrote in message
news:uadamv9fot6vda@corp.supernews.com...
> We'll I would like to thank all of the Ada vendors for replying, I can see
> that the future of Ada on the PC is in good hands (as it's always been).
>
I take that to be sarcasm. Generally, you won't hear the Ada vendors respond
to much in this forum. *Maybe* if you make a bogus claim about their
products or gratuitously insult the quality of their compilers, you might
see a post correcting that perception, but we just don't see a lot of
"Speaking For Compilers-R-Us" sorts of posts here when the topic is "Where
should Ada be heading?". Too bad. It would often be nice to hear the
vendor's positions on various subjects that come up here.


> Thank God I earn my paycheck using Ada on embedded systems.  I will just
> have to be content knowing that Ada has found her nitch market in safety
> critical systems, large complex weapon systems, and a few mission critical
> commercial efforts.
>
Ada has an easier time fitting into that niche. Unfortunately, many embedded
developers pay little attention to it.


>
> The company I work for is undergoing a serious process improvement effort,
> we are standardizing on a great many things (thank God one of the things
is
> Ada95 for embedded systems, C comes in a rare second and only when Ada is
> not available). We are also trying to standardize on the languages used
for
> future test equipment software development (this type of software is GUI
> intensive, and makes extensive use of fancy I/O cards).
>
Maybe you wouldn't mind telling us who you work for? Its interesting (and
admirable) to notice that some company is making sound decisions about
software development and including Ada in their best practices.


> Many of the software engineers involved in the standardization effort
would
> love to use Ada even for this class of applications, but when push comes
to
> shove Ada can't hold a candle to any of the other languages coupled with
> their GUI environments. The MS Visual Studio supported languages can't be
> beat for their level of integration into the underlying OS and almost
every
> I/O board on the market comes with drivers/APIs for their products.
>
I wouldn't expect Ada to attempt to compete head-to-head with an MS built
product. It would lose - if for no other reason than MS will always be able
to keep changing the playing field. Ada's strength (one of them, at least)
lies in its ability to be operating-system-agnostic. You might try looking
at GtkAda as a means of developing apps with some level of OS independence -
well, as long as its one of two kinds of OS. :-) Ada would benefit from
defining *something* as a kind of standard GUI interface or GUI
development/execution environment so it could be used more readily to build
portable apps on a variety of platforms. But that, of course, requires some
consensus in the community - and in particular from the vendors, and, well,
we don't hear much from them. :-)



MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com